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Sex in Education; 



OR, 



A FAIR CHANCE FOR THE GIRLS. 



•>/ 



EDWARD H. CLARKE, M.D., 

MEMBBK OF THE MASSACHUSETTS MEDICAL SOCIETY; FELLOW OF 

THE AMERICAN ACADEMY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES; 

LATE PROFESSOR OF MATERIA MEDICA 

IN HARVARD COLLEGE, 

ETC., ETC. 




UML 



BOSTON: 
JAMES R. OSGOOD AND COMPANY, 

(late TICKNOR & FIELDS, AND FIELDS, OSGOOD, & CO.) 
1873. 



V^C- 



^C<.'>■ > 






Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1873, by 

EDWARD H. CLARKE, 

In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. 



BOSTON t 
STERBOTYPED AND PRINTED BY RAND, AVERY, & CO. 



"An American female constitution, wMcli collapses just in the 
middle third of life, and comes out vulcanized India-rubber, if it 
happen to live through the period when health and strength are 
most wanted." 

Oliver Wendell Holmes : Autocrat of the BreaJcfast Table. 

"He reverenced and upheld, in every form in which it came be- 
fore him, womanhood. . . . "What a woman should demand is respect 
for her as she is a woman. Let her first lesson be, with sweet Susan 
Winstanley, to reverence her sexJ" 

Charles Lamb : Essays of Elia. 

" "We trust that the time now approaches when man's condition 
shall be progressively improved by the force of reason and truth, 
when the brute part of nature shall be crushed, that the god-like 
spirit may unfold." 

GrUTZOT ; History of Civilization, I., 34. 



PEEFAOE. 



About a year ago tlie author was honored by 
an invitation to address the New-England Wo- 
men's Club in Boston. He accepted the invi- 
tation, and selected for his subject the relation of 
sex to the education of women. The essay excit- 
ed an unexpected amount of discussion. Brief 
reports of it found their way into the public jour- 
nals. Teachers and others interested in the edu- 
cation of girls, in different parts of the country, 
who read these reports, or heard of them, made in- 
quiry, by letter or otherwise, respecting it. Various 
and conflicting criticisms were passed upon it. This 
manifestation of interest in a brief and unstudied 
lecture to a small club appeared to the author to 
indicate a general appreciation of the importance 
of the theme he had chosen, compelled him to 
review carefully the statements he had made, and 

5 



6 PREFACE. 

has emboldened him to think that their publication 
in a more comprehensive form, with added physio- 
logical details and clinical illustrations, might con- 
tribute something, however little, to the cause of 
sound education. Moreover, his own conviction, 
not only of the importance of the subject, but of 
the soundness of the conclusions he has reached, 
and of the necessity of bringing physiological 
facts and laws prominently to the notice of all who 
are interested in education, conspires with the in- 
terest excited by the theme of his lecture to jus- 
tify him in presenting these pages to the public. 
The leisure of his last professional vacation has 
been devoted to their preparation. The original 
address, with the exception of a few verbal alter- 
ations, is incorporated into them. 

Great plainness of speech will be observed 
throughout this essay. The nature of the subject 
it discusses, the general misapprehension both of 
the strong and weak points in the physiology of 
the woman question, and the ignorance displayed 
by many, of what the co-education of the sexes 
really means, all forbid that ambiguity of language 
or euphemism of expression should be employed 
in the discussion. The subject is treated solely 



PREFACE, 7 

from tlie standpoint of physiology. Technical 
terms have been employed, only where their use 
is more exact or less offensive than common ones. 
If the publication of this brief memoir does noth- 
ing more than excite discussion and stimulate in- 
vestigation with regard to a matter of such vital 
moment to the nation as the relation of sex to 
education, the author will be amply repaid for the 
time and labor of its preparation. N"o one can 
appreciate more than he its imperfections. Not- 
withstanding these, he hopes a little good may 
be extracted from it, and so commends it to the 
consideration of all who desire the best education 
of the sexes. 

« 

Boston, 18 Arlington Stkbet, October, 1873. 



CONTENTS. 



PART I. 
Introductory 11 

PART n. 
Chiefly Physiological . 31 

PART ni. 
Chiefly Clinical 61 

PART IV. 
Co-Education . ^ 118 

PART V. 

The European Way 162 

9 



SEX m EDUCATION. 



PART I. 

INTRODUCTORY. 



"Is there any thing better in a State than that both 
women and men be rendered the very best 1 There is not/' — 
Plato. 

It is idle to say that what is right for man 

is wrong for woman. Pure reason, abstract 

right and wrong, have nothing to do with sex : 

they neither recognize nor know it. They 

teach that what is right or wrong for man is 

equally right and wrong for woman. Both 

sexes are bound by the same code of morals ; 

both are amenable to the same divine law. 

Both have a right to do the best they can ; or, 

to speak more justly, both should feel the 

duty, and have the opportunity, to do their 

11 



12 SEX IN EDUCATION. 

best. Eacli must justify its existence by be- 
coming a complete development of manhood 
.and womanhood ; and each should refuse 
whatever limits or dwarfs that development. 
The problem of woman's sphere, to use the 
modern phrase, is not to be solved by apply- 
ing to it abstract principles of right and 
wrong. Its solution must be obtained from 
physiology, not from ethics or metaphysics. 
The question must be submitted to Agassi z 
and Huxley, not to Kant or Calvin, to Church 
or Pope. Without denying the self-evident 
proposition, that whatever a woman can do, she 
has a right to do, the question at once arises, 
What can she do ? And this includes the fur- 
ther question, What can she best do ? A girl 
can hold a plough, and ply a needle, after a 
fashion. If she can do both better than a man, 
she ought to be both farmer and seamstress ; 
but if, on the whole, her husband can hold 
best the plough, and she ply best the needle, 
they should divide the labor. He should be 
master of the plough, and she mistress of the 
loom. The qucestio vexata of woman's sphere 



INTRODUCTORY. 13 

will be decided by her organization. This 
limits her power, and reveals her divinely^ 
appointed tasks, just as man's organization 
limits his power, and reveals his work. In the 
development of the organization is to be found 
the way of strength and power for both sexes. 
Limitation or abortion of development leads 
both to weakness and failure. 

Neither is there any such thing as inferior- 
ity or superiority in this matter. Man is not 
superior to woman, nor woman to man. The 
relation of the sexes is one of equality, not of 
better and worse, or of higher and lower. 
By this it is not intended to say that the sexes 
are the same. They are different, widely dif- 
ferent from each other, and so different that 
each can do, in certain directions, what the 
other cannot ; and in other directions, where 
both can do the same things, one sex, as a 
rule, can do them better than the other ; and 
in still other matters they seem to be so nearly 
ahke, that they can interchange labor without 
perceptible difference. All this is so well 
known, that it would be useless to refer to it, 



14 SEX IN EDUCATION. 

were it not that much of the discussion of 
the irrepressible woman-question, and many 
of the efforts for bettering her education and 
widening her sphere, seem to ignore any dif- 
ference of the sexes ; seem to treat her as if 
she were identical with man, and to be trained 
in precisely the same way ; as if her organiza- 
tion, and consequently her function, were mas- 
culine, not feminine. There are those who 
write and act as if their object were to assimi- 
late woman as much as possible to man, by 
dropping all that is distinctively feminine out 
of her, and putting into her as large an 
amount of masculineness as possible. These 
persons tacitly admit the error just alluded to, 
that woman is inferior to man, and strive to 
get rid of the inferiority by making her a man. 
There may be some subtle physiological basis 
for such views ; for many who hold and advo- 
cate them are of those, who, having passed 
middle life without the symmetry and devel- 
opment that maternity gives, have drifted into 
the hermaphroditic condition that sometimes 
accompanies spinsterism. One of these 



INTRODUGTOBY, 15 

torsos, who was glad to have escaped the 
chains of matrimony, but knew the value and 
lamented the loss of maternity, wished she 
had been born a widow with two children. 
This misconception arises from mistaking dif- 
ference of organization and function for differ- 
ence of position in the scale of being, which 
is equivalent to saying that man is rated 
higher in the divine order because he has more 
muscle, and woman lower because she has 
more fat. The loftiest ideal of humanity, re- 
jecting all comparisons of inferiority and su- 
periority between the sexes, demands that each 
shall be perfect in its kind, and not be hin- 
dered in its best work. The lily is not infe- 
rior to the rose, nor the oak superior to the 
clover ; yet the glory of the lily is one, and 
the glory of the oak is another ; and the use 
of the oak is not the use of the clover. That 
is poor horticulture which would train them 
all alike. 

When Col. Higginson asked, not long ago, 
in one of his charming essays, that almost 
persuade the reader, " Ought women to learn 



16 SEX IN EDUCATION. 

the alphabet ? " and added, " Give woman, if 
you dare, the alphabet, then summon her to 
the career," his physiology was not equal 
to his wit. Women will learn the alphabet 
at any rate ; and man will be powerless to pre- 
vent them, should he undertake so ungracious 
a task. The real question is not, Shall women 
learn the alphabet ? but Mow shall they learn 
it ? In this case, how is more important than 
ought or shall. The principle and duty are 
not denied. The method is not so plain. 

The fact that women have often equalled 
and sometimes excelled men in physical 
labor, intellectual effort, and lofty heroism, is 
sufficient proof that women have muscle, 
mind, and soul, as well as men ; but it is no 
proof that they have had, or should have, the 
same kind of training ; nor is it any proof that 
they are destined for the same career as men. 
The presumption is, that if woman, subjected 
to a masculine training, arranged for the 
development of a masculine organization, can 
equal man, she ought to excel him if educated 
by a feminine training, arranged to develop a 



INTRODUCTORY, 17 

feminine organization. Indeed, I have some- 
where encountered an author who boldly 
affirms the superiority of women to all exist- 
ences on this planet, because of the complexity 
of their organization. Without undertaking 
to indorse such an opinion, it may be affirmed, 
that an appropriate method of education for 
girls — one that should not ignore the me- 
chanism of their bodies or blight any of their 
vital organs — would yield a better result than 
the world has yet seen. 

Gail Hamilton's statement is true, that, " a 
girl can go to school, pu-rsue all the studies 
which Dr. Todd enumerates, except ad infi- 
nitum ; know them, npt as well as a chemist 
knows chemistry or a botanist botany, but 
as well as they are known by boys of her age 
and training, as well, indeed, as they are 
known by many college-taught men, enough, 
at least, to be a solace and a resource to her ; 
then graduate before she is eighteen, and 
come out of school as healthy, as fresh, as 
eager, as she went in." * But it is not true 

* Woman's Wrongs, p. 59. 



18 SEX IN education: ' 

that she can do all this, and retain uninjured 
health and a future secure from neuralgia, 
uterine disease, hysteria, and other derange- 
ments of the nervous system, if she follows 
the same method that boys are trained in. 
Boys must study and work in a boy's way, and 
girls in a girl's way. They may study the same 
books, and attain an equal result, but should 
not follow the same method. Mary can mas- 
ter Virgil and Euclid as well as George ; but 
both will be dwarfed, — defrauded of their 
rightful attainment, — if both are confined to 
the same methods. . It is said that Elena Cor- 
naro, the accomplished professor of six lan- 
guages, whose statue adorns and honors 
Padua, was educated like a boy. This means 
that she was initiated into, and mastered, the 
studies that were considered to be the pecu- 
liar dower of men. It does not mean that 
her life was a man's life, her way of study a 
man's way of study, or that, in acquiring six 
languages, she ignored her own organization. 
Women who choose to do so can master the 
humanities and the mathematics, encounter 



INTRODUCTORY. 19 

the labor of the law and the pulpit, endure 
the hardness of physic and the conflicts of pol- 
itics ; but they must do it all in woman's way, 
not in man's way. In all their work they must 
respect their own organization, and remain 
women, not strive to be men, or they will ig- 
nominiously fail. For both sexes, there is no 
exception to the law, that their greatest power 
and largest attainment lie in the perfect de- 
velopment of their organization. " Woman," 
says a late writer, " must be regarded as wo- 
man, not as a nondescript animal, with greater 
or less capacity for assimilation to man." If 
we would give our girls a fair chance, and see 
them become and do their best by reaching 
after and attaining an ideal beauty and pow- 
er, which shall be a crown of glory and a 
tower of strength to the republic, we must look 
after their complete development as women. 
Wherein they are men, they should be edu- 
cated as men ; wherein they are women, they 
should be educated as women. The physio- 

! logical motto is. Educate a man for manhood, 

j 

: a woman for womanhood, both for humanity. 

In this lies the hope of the race. 



20 SEX m EDUCATION. 

Perhaps it should be mentioned in this con- 
nection, that, throughout this paper, education 
is not used in the limited and technical sense 
of intellectual or mental training alone. By- 
saying there is a boy's way of study and a 
girl's way of study, it is not asserted that the 
intellectual process which masters Juvenal, 
German, or chemistry, is different for the two 
sexes. Education is here intended to include 
what its etymology indicates, the drawing out 
and development of every part of the system ; 
and this necessarily includes the whole man- 
ner of life, physical and psychical, during the 
educational period. " Education," says Wor- 
cester, " comprehends all that series of in- 
struction and discipline which is intended to 
enlighten the understanding, correct the tem- 
per, and form the manners and habits, of 
youth, and fit them for usefulness in their fu- 
ture stations." It has been and is the mis- 
fortune of this country, and particularly of 
New England, that education, stripped of this, 
its proper signification, has popularly stood 
for studying, without regard to the physical 



INTRODUCTORY. 21 

training or no. training that the schools af- 
ford. The cerebral processes by which the 
acquisition of knowledge is made are the same 
for each sex ; but the mode of life which gives 
the finest nurture to the brain, and so enables 
those processes to yield their best result, is 
not the same for each sex. The best educa- 

m 

tional training for a boy is not the best for a 
girl, nor that for a girl best for a boy. 

The delicate bloom, early but rapidly fad- 
ing beauty, and singular pallor of American 
girls and women have almost passed into a 
proverb. The first observation of a Euro- 
pean that lands upon our shores is, that our 
women are a feeble race ; and, if he is a phy- 
siological observer, he is sure to add. They 
will give birth to a feeble race, not of women 
only, but of men as well. " I never saw 
before so many pretty girls together," said 
Lady Amberley to the writer, after a visit to 
the public schools of Boston ; and then added, 
" They all looked sick." Circumstances have 
repeatedly carried me to Europe, where I am 
always surprised by the red blood that fills 



22 SEX IN EDUCATION. 

and colors the faces of ladies and peasant 
girls, reminding one of the canvas of Rubens 
and Murillo ; and am always equally sur- 
prised on my return, by crowds of pale, 
bloodless female faces, that suggest consump- 
tion, scrofula, anemia, and neuralgia. To 
a large extent, our present system of edu- 
cating girls is the cause of this pallor and 
weakness. How our schools, through their 
methods of education, contribute to this un- 
fortunate result, and how our colleges that 
have undertaken to educate girls like boys, 
that is, in the same way, have succeeded in 
intensifying the evils of the schools, will be 
pointed out in another place. 

It has just been said that the educational 
methods of our schools and colleges for girls 
are, to a large extent, the cause of " the 
thousand ills " that beset American women. 
Let it be remembered that this is not assert- 
ing that such methods of education are the 
sole cause of female weaknesses, but only 
that they are one cause, and one of the most 
important causes of it. An immense loss of 



INTRODUCTORY. 23 

female power may be fairly charged to irra- 
tional cooking and indigestible diet. We 
live in the zone of perpetual pie and dough- 
nut ; and our girls revel in those unassimilable 
abominations. Much also may be credited to 
artificial deformities strapped to the spine, or 
piled on the head, much to corsets and skirts, 
and as much to the omission of clothing 
where it is needed as to excess where the 
body does not require it ; but, after the am- 
plest allowance for these as causes of weak- 
ness, there remains a large margin of disease 
unaccounted for. Those grievous maladies 
which torture a woman's earthly existence, 
called leucorrhoea, amenorrhoea, dysmenor- 
rhoea, chronic and acute ovaritis, prolapsus 
uteri, hysteria, neuralgia, and the like, are 
indirectly affected by food, clothing, and ex- 
ercise ; they are directly and largely affected 
by the causes that will be presently pointed 
out, and which arise from a neglect of the 
peculiarities of a woman's organization. 
The regimen of our schools fosters this neg- 
lect. The regimen of a college arranged for 



24 -S'^X IN EDUCATION. 

bojs, if imposed on girls, would foster it still 
more. 

The scope of this paper does not permit 
the discussion of these other causes of female 
weaknesses. Its object is to call attention to 
the errors of physical training that have crept 
into, and twined themselves about, our ways 
of educating girls, both in public and private 
schools, and which now threaten to attain a 
larger development, and inflict a consequently 
greater injury, by their introduction into col- 
leges and large seminaries of learning, that 
have adopted, or are preparing to adopt, the 
co-education of the sexes. Even if there 
were space to do so, it would not be neces- 
sary to discuss here the other causes alluded 
to. They are receiving the amplest attention 
elsewhere. The gifted authoress of " The 
Gates Ajar " has blown her trumpet with no 
uncertain sound, in explanation and advocacy 
of a new-clothes philosophy, which her sis- 
ters will do well to heed rather than to ridi- 
cule. It would be a blessing to the race, if 
some inspired prophet of clothes would ap- 



INTRODUCTORY. 25 

pear, who should teach the coming woman 
how, in pharmaceutical phrase, to fit, put on, 
wear, and take off her dress, — 

« Cito, Tuto, et Jucunde." 

Corsets that embrace the waist with a tighter 
and steadier grip than any lover's arm, and 
skirts that weight the hips with heavier than 
maternal burdens, have often caused grievous 
maladies, and imposed a needless invalidism. 
Yet, recognizing all this, it must not be for- 
gotten that breeches do not make a man, nor 
the want of them unmake a woman. 

Let the statement be emphasized and re- 
iterated until it is heeded, that woman's neg- 
lect of her own organization, though not the 
sole explanation and cause of her many weak- 
nesses, more than any single cause, adds to 
their number, and intensifies their power. It 
limits and lowers her action very much, as 
man is limited and degraded by dissipation. 
The saddest part of it all is, that this neglect 
of herself in girlhood, when her organization 
is ductile and impressible, breeds the germs 



26 SEX Iir EDUCATION'. 

of diseases that in later life yield torturing 
or fatal maladies. Every physician's note- 
book affords copious illustrations of these 
statements. The number of them which the 
writer has seen prompted this imperfect 
essay upon a subject in which the public has 
a most vital interest, and with regard to 
which it acts with the courage of ignorance. 

Two considerations deserve to be men- 
tioned in this connection. One is, that no 
organ or function in plant, animal, or human 
kind, can be properly regarded as a disability 
or source of weakness. Through ignorance or 
misdirection, it may limit or enfeeble the ani- 
mal or being that misguides it ; but, rightly 
guided and developed, it is either in itself a 
source of power and grace to its parent stock, 
or a necessary stage in the development of 
larger grace and power. The female organi- 
zation is no exception to this law ; nor are the 
particular set of organs and their functions 
with which this essay has to deal an exception 
to it. The periodical movements which char- 
acterize and influence woman's structure for 



INTRODUCTORY. 27 

more tlian half her terrestrial life, and which, 
in their ebb and flow, sway every fibre and 
thrill every nerve of her body a dozen times 
a year, and the occasional pregnancies which 
test her material resources, and cradle the 
race, are, or are evidently intended to be, 
fountains of power, not hinderances, to her. 
They are not infrequently spoken of by 
women themselves with half-smothered 
anathemas ; often endured only as a necessary 
evil and sign of inferiority ; and commonly 
ignored, till some steadily-advancing malady 
whips the recalcitrant sufferer into acknowl- 
edgment of their power, and respect for 
their function. All this is a sad mistake. It 
is a foolish and criminal delicacy that has 
persuaded woman to be so ashamed of the 
temple God built for her as to neglect one of 
its most important services. On account of 
this neglect, each succeeding generation, 
obedient to the law of hereditary transmis- 
sion, has become feebler than its predecessor. 
Our great-grandmothers are pointed at as 
types of female physical excellence; their 



28 SEX m EDUCATION. 

great - grand - daughters as illustrations of 
female physical degeneracy. There is con- 
solation, however, in the hope, based on sub- 
stantial physiological data, that our great- 
grand-daughters may recapture their ances- 
tors' bloom and force. " Three generations 
of wholesome life," says Mr. Greg, " might 
suffice to eliminate the ancestral poison, for 
the vis medicatrix naturce has wonderful effi- 
cacy when allowed free play; and perhaps 
the time may come when the worst cases 
shall deem it a plain duty to curse no future 
generations with the damnosa hereditas, 
which has caused such bitter wretchedness 
to themselves." * 

The second consideration is the acknowl- 
edged influence of beauty. "When one 
sees a god-like countenance," said Socrates 
to Phsedrus, " or some bodily form that rep- 
resents beauty, he reverences it as a god, 
and would sacrifice to it." From the days 
of Plato till now, all have felt the power of 
woman's beauty, and been more than willing 

* Enigmas of Life, p. 34. 



XNTRODUOTORY. 29 

to sacrifice to it. The proper, not exclusive 
search for it is a legitimate inspiration. The 
way for a girl to obtain her portion of this 
radiant halo is by the symmetrical develop- 
ment of every part of her organization, 
muscle, ovary, stomach and nerve, and by a 
physiological management of every function 
that correlates every organ ; not by neglect- 
ing or trying to stifle or abort any of the 
vital and integral parts of her structure, and 
supplying the deficiency by invoking the aid 
of the milliner's stuffing, the colorist's pencil, 
the druggist's compounds, the doctor's pelvic 
supporter, and the surgeon's spinal brace. 

When travelling in the East, some years 
ago, it was my fortune to be summoned as a 
physician into a harem. With curious and 
not unwilling step I obeyed the summons. 
While examining the patient, nearly a dozen 
Syrian girls — a grave Turk's wifely crowd, 
his matrimonial bouquet and armful of con- 
nubial bliss — pressed around the divan with 
eyes and ears intent to see and hear a Western 
Hakim's medical examination. As I looked 



30 SEX IN EDUCATION, 

upon their well-developed forms, their brown 
skins, rich with the blood and sun of the 
East, and their unintelligent, sensuous faces, 
I thought that if it were possible to marry 
the Oriental care of woman's organization to 
the Western liberty and culture of her brain, 
there would be a new birth and loftier type 
of womanly grace and force. 



PART n. 

CHIEFLY PHYSIOLOGICAL. 

" She girdeth her loins with strength." — Solomon. 

Befoee describing the special forms of ill 
that exist among- our American, certainly 
among our New-England girls and women, 
and that are often caused and fostered by our 
methods of education and social customs, it 
is important to refer in considerable detail to 
a few physiological matters. Physiology 
serves to disclose the cause, and explain the 
modus operandi^ of these ills, and offers the 
only rational clew to their prevention and re- 
lief. The order in which the physiological 
data are presented that bear upon this dis- 
cussion is not essential ; tLeir relation to the 
subject matter of it will be obvious as we 
proceed. 

81 



32 SEX IN education: 

The sacred number, three, dominates the 
human frame. There is a trinity in our anato- 
my. Three systems, to which all the organs 
are directly or indirectly subsidiary, divide and 
control the body. First, there is the nutritive 
system, composed of stomach, intestines, liver, 
pancreas, glands, and vessels, by which food 
is elaborated, effete matter removed, the blood 
manufactured, and the whole organization 
nourished. This is the commissariat. Second- 
ly, there is the nervous system, which co-ordi- 
nates all the organs and functions; which 
enables man to entertain relations with the * 
world around him, and with his fellows ; and 
through which intellectual power is manifest- 
ed, and human thought and reason made pos- 
sible. Thirdly, there is the reproductive sys- 
tem, by which the race is continued, and its 
grasp on the earth assured. The first two of 
these systems are alike in each sex. They 
are so alike, that they require a siijailar train- 
ing in each, and yield in each a similar result. 
The machinery of them is the same. No 
scalpel has disclosed any difference between 



CHIEFLY PHYSIOLOGICAL, 33 

a man's and a woman's liver. No microscope 
has revealed any structure, fibre, or cell, in 
the brain of man or woman, that is not com- 
mon to both. No analysis or dynamometer 
has discovered or measured any chemical ac- 
tion or nerve-force that stamps either of these 
systems as male or female. From these ana- 
tomical and physiological data alone, the in- 
ference is legitimate, that intellectual power, 
the correlation and measure of cerebral struc- 
ture and metamorphosis, is capable of equal l 
development in both sexes. With regard to 
the reproductive system, the case is altogether 
different. Woman, in the interest of the race, 
is dowered with a set of organs peculiar to 
herself, whose complexity, delicacy, sympa- 
thies, and force are among the marvels of 
creation. If properly nurtured and cared for, 
they are a source of strength and power to 
her. If neglected and mismanaged, they 
retaliate upon their possessor with weakness 
and disease, as well of the mind as of the 
body, God was not in error, when, after Eve's 
creation, he looked upon his work, and pro- 



34 SEX IN EDUCATION, 

nounced it good. Let Eve take a wise care 
of the temple God made for her, and Adam 
of the one made for him, and both will enter 
upon a career whose glory and beauty no 
seer has foretold or poet sung. 

Ever since the time of Hippocrates, woman 
has been physiologically described as enjoying, 
and has always recognized herself as enjoying, 
or at least as possessing, a tri-partite life. The 
first period extends from birth to about the 
age of twelve or fifteen years; the second, 
from the end of the first period to about the 
age of forty-five ; and the third, from the last 
boundary to the final passage into the un- 
known. The few years that are necessary 
for the voyage from the first to the second 
period, and those from the second to the 
third, are justly called critical ones. Mothers 
are, or should be, wisely anxious about the 
\ first passage for their daughters, and women 
are often unduly apprehensive about the 
second passage for themselves. All this is 
obvious and known ; and yet, in our educa- 
tional arrangements, little heed is paid to 



CHIEFLY PHYSIOLOGICAL, 35 

the fact, that the first of these critical 
voyages is made during a girl's educational 
life, and extends over a very considerable 
portion of it. 

This brief statement only hints at the vital 
physiological truths it contains : it does not 
disclose them. Let us look at some of them 
a moment. Remember, that we are now con- 
cerned only, with the first of these passages, 
that from a girl's childhood to her maturity. 
In childhood, boys and girls are very nearly 
alike. If they are natural, they talk and 
romp, chase butterflies and climb fences, love 
and hate, with an innocent abandon that is 
ignorant of sex. Yet even then the differ- 
ence is apparent to the observing. Inspired 
by the divine instinct of motherhood, the girl 
that can only creep to her mother's knees will 
caress a doll, that her tottling brother looks 
coldly upon. The infant Ulysses breaks the 
thin disguise of his gown and sleeves by drop- 
ping the distaff, and grasping the sword. As 
maturity approaches, the sexes diverge. An 
unmistakable difference marks the form and 



36 SEX IN EDUCATION. 

features of each, and reveals the demand for 
a special training. This divergence, however, 
is limited in its sweep and its duration. The 
difference exists for a definite purpose, and 
goes only to a definite extent. The curves of 
separation swell out as childhood recedes, like 
an ellipse, and, as old age draws on, approach, 
till they unite like an ellipse again. In old 
age, the second childhood, the difference of 
sex becomes of as little note as it was during 
the first. At that period, the picture of the 

" Lean and slippered pantaloon, 
With spectacles on nose, and pouch on side, 



Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans every thing," 

is faithful to either sex. Not as man or 
woman, but as a sexless being, does advanced 
age enter and pass the portals of what is 
called death. 

, During the first of these critical periods, 
when the divergence of the sexes becomes 
obvious to the most careless observer, the 
complicated apparatus peculiar to the female 
enters upon a condition of functional activity. 



CHIEFLY PHYSIOLOGICAL. 37 

" The ovaries, which constitute," says Dr. Dal- 
ton, " the ' essential parts ' * of this apparatus, 
and certain accessory organs, are now rapidly 
developed." Previously they were inactive. 
During infancy and childhood all of them ex- 
isted, or rather all the germs of them existed ; 
but they were incapable of function. At 
this period they take on a process of rapid 
growth and development. Coincident with 
this process, indicating it, and essential to it, are 
the periodical phenomena which characterize 
woman's physique till she attains the third 
division of her tripartite life. The growth of 
this peculiar and marvellous apparatus, in the 
perfect development of which humanity has 
so large an interest, occurs during the few 
years of a girl's educational life. No such 
extraordinary task, calling for such rapid 
expenditure of force, building up such a deli- 
cate and extensive mechanism within the 
organism, — a house within a house, an engine 
within an engine, — is imposed upon the male 



* Human Physiology, p. 546. 



38 SEX IN EDUCATION, 

physique at the same epoch.* The organiza- 
tion of the male grows steadily, gradually, 
and equally, from birth to maturity. The 
importance of having our methods of female 
education recognize this peculiar demand for 
growth, and of so adjusting themselves to 
it, as to allow a sufficient opportunity for 
the healthy development of the ovaries and 
their accessory organs, and for the estab- 
lishment of their periodical functions, can- 
not be overestimated. Moreover, unless the 
work is accomplished at that period, unless 
the reproductive mechanism is built and 
put in good working order at that time, 
it is never perfectly accomplished afterwards. 
"It is not enough," says Dr. Charles 

* As might be expected, the mortality of girls is greater at 
this period than that of boys, an additional reason for im- 
posing less labor on the former at that time. According to 
the authority of MM. Quetelet and Smits, the mortality of 
the two sexes is equal in childhood, or that of the male is 
greatest ; but that of the female rises between the ages of 
fourteen and sixteen to 1.28 to one male death. For the next 
four years, it falls again to 1.05 females to one male death. 
— Sur la Beprodudion et la Mortality de I'Homme. 8vo. Brux- 
eSes, 



CHIEFLY PHYSIOLOGICAL. . 39 

West, the accomplished London physician, 
and lecturer on diseases of women, "it 
is not enough to take precautions till men- 
struation has for the first time occurred : the 
period for its return should, even in the 
healthiest girl, be watched for, and all pre- 
vious precautions should be once more re- 
peated; and this should be done again and 
again, until at length the hahit of regular, 
healthy menstruation is established. If this 
be not accomplished during the first few 
years of womanhood, it will, in all probability, 
never be attained." * There have been in- 
stances, and I have seen such, of females in 
whom the special mechanism we are speak- 
ing of remained germinal, — undeveloped. It 
seemed to have been aborted. They gradu- 
ated from school or college excellent scholars, 
but with undeveloped ovaries. Later they 
married, and were sterile, t 

, ■ I I ■ , I ■ .11. -• "-iim !■■ 

* Lectures on Diseases of Women. Am. ed., p. 48. 

t " Much less uncommon than the absence of either ovary 
is the persistence of both through the whole or greater part 
of life in the condition which they present in infancy and 
garly childhood, with scarcely a trace of graafian vesicles in 



40 SEX IN EDUCATION, 

The system never does two things well at 
the same time. The muscles and the brain 
cannot functionate in their best way at the 
same moment. One cannot meditate a poem 
and drive a saw simultaneously, without divid- 
ing his force. He may poetize fairly, and 
saw poorly ; or he may saw fairly, and poetize 
poorly ; or he may both saw and poetize in- 
differently. Brain-work and stomach-work 
interfere with each other if attempted to- 
gether. The digestion of a dinner calls force 
to the stomach, and temporarily slows the 
brain. The experiment of trying to digest a 
hearty supper, and to sleep during the process, 
has sometimes cost the careless experimenter 
his life. The physiological principle of doing 
only one thing at a time, if you would do it 
well, holds as truly of the growth of the or- 
ganization as it does of the performance of 

their tissue. This want of development of the ovaries is 
generally, though not invariably, associated with want of 
ievelopment of the uterus and other sexual organs ; and I 
need not say that women in whom it exists are sterile." — 
Lectures on the Diseases of Women, by Charles West, M.D, 
Am, ed., p. 37. 



CHIEFLY PHYSIOLOGICAL. 41 

any of its special functions. If excessive 
labor, either mental or physical, is imposed 
upon children, male or female, their develop- 
ment v^ill be in some way checked. If the 
schoolmaster overworks the brains of his 
pupils, he diverts force to the brain that is 
needed elsewhere. He spends in the study 
of geography and arithmetic, of Latin, Greek 
and chemistry, in the brain-work of the school 
room, force that should have been spent in 
the manufacture of blood, muscle, and nerve, 
that is, in growth. The results are monstrous 
brains and puny bodies; abnormally active 
cerebration, and abnormally weak digestion ; 
flowing thought and constipated bowels ; 
lofty aspirations and neuralgic sensations ; 

"A youth of study and an old age oi nerves." 

Nature has reserved the catamenial week for 
the process of ovulation, and for the develop- 
ment and perfectation of the reproductive 
system. Previously to the age of eighteen or 
twenty, opportunity must be periodically al- 
lowed for the accomplishment of this task. 



42 SEX IN EDUCATION-, 

Both muscular and brain labor must be re- 
mitted enough to yield sufficient force for the 
work. If the reproductive machinery is not 
manufactured then, it "will not be later. 
If it is imperfectly made then, it can only be 
patched up, not made perfect, afterwards. To 
be well made, it must be carefully managed. 
Force must be allowed to flow thither in an 
ample stream, and not diverted to the brain by 
the school, or to the arms by the factory, or to 
the feet by dancing. " Every physician," 
says a recent writer, " can point to students 
whose splendid cerebral development has been 
paid for by emaciated limbs, enfeebled diges- 
tion, and disordered lungs. Every biography 
of the intellectual great records the dangers 
they have encountered, often those to which 
they have succumbed, in overstepping the 
ordinary bounds of human capacity ; and 
while beckoning onward to the glories of 
their almost preternatural achievements, re- 
gister, by way of warning, the fearful penalty 
of disease, suffering, and bodily infirmity, 
which Nature exacts as the price for this par- 



CHIEFLY PHYSIOLOGICAL, 43 

tial and inharmonious grandeur. It cannot be 
otherwise. The brain cannot take more than 
its share without injury to other organs. It 
cannot do more than its share without depriv- 
ing other organs of that exercise and nourish- 
ment which are essential to their health and 
vigor. It is in the power of the individual to 
throw, as it were, the whole vigor of the con- 
stitution into any one part, and, by giving to 
this part exclusive or excessive attention, to 
develop it at the expense, and to the neglect, 
of the others.* 

In the system of lichens, Nylander reckons 
all organs of equal value.f No one of them can 
be neglected without evil to the whole or- 
ganization. From lichens to men and women 
there is no exception to the law, that, if one 
member suffers, all the members suffer. What 
is true of the neglect of a single organ, is 
true in a geometrical ratio of the neglect of 
a system of organs. If the nutritive system 
is wrong, the evil of poor nourishment and 

* Enigmas of Life, pp. 165-8. 

t Tuckerman's Genera Lichenum. Introduction, p. v. 



44 SEX IN EDUCATION. 

bad assimilation infects the whole economy. 
Brain and thought are enfeebled, because the 
stomach and liver are in error. If the ner- 
vous system is abnormally developed, every 
organ feels the twist in the nerves. The bal- 
ance and co-ordination of movement and 
function are destroyed, and the ill percolates 
into an unhappy posterity. If the repro- 
ductive system is aborted, there may be no 
future generations to pay the penalty of the 
abortion, but what is left of the organism 
suffers sadly. When this sort of arrest of 
development occurs in a man, it takes the 
element of masculineness out of him, and re- 
places it with adipose effeminacy. When it 
occurs in a woman, it not only substitutes in 
her case a wiry and perhaps thin bearded 
masculineness for distinctive feminine traits 
and power, making her an epicene, but it en- 
tails a variety of prolonged weaknesses, that 
dwarf her rightful power in almost every 
direction. The persistent neglect and ignor- 
ing by women, and especially by girls', igno- 
rantly more than wilfully, of that part of 



CHIEFLY PHYSIOLOGICAL, 45 

their organization wMcli they hold in trust 
for the future of the race, has been fearfully 
punished here in America, where, of all the 
world, they are least trammelled and should 
be the best, by all sorts of female trou- 
bles. " Nature," says Lord Bacon, " is 
often hidden, sometimes overcome, seldom 
extinguished." In the education of our 
girls, the attempt to hide or overcome nature 
by training them as boys has almost extin- 
guished them as girls. Let the fact be ac- 
cepted, that there is nothing to be ashamed 
of in a woman's organization, and let her 
whole education and life be guided by the 
divine requirements of her system. 

The blood, which is our life, is a complex 
fluid. It contains the materials out of which 
the tissues are made, and also the debris 
which results from the destruction of the 
same tissues, — the worn-out cells of brain 
and muscle, — the cast-off clothes of emotion, 
thought, and power. It is a common carrier, 
conveying unceasingly to every gland and 
tissue, to every nerve and organ, the fibrin 



46 SEX IN EDUOATIOy, 

and albumen wliicli repair their constant 
waste, thus supplying their daily bread ; and 
as unceasingly conveying away from every 
gland-and tissue, from every nerve and organ, 
the oxidized refuse, which are both the result 
and measure of their work. Like the water 
flowing through the canals of Venice, that 
carries health and wealth to the portals of 
every house, and filth and disease from every 
doorway, the blood flowing through the 
canals of the organization carries nutriment 
to all the tissues, and refuse from them. Its 
current sweeps nourishment in, and waste 
out. The former, it yields to the body for 
assimilation ; the latter, it deposits with the 
organs of elimination for rejection. In order 
to have good blood, then, two things are es- 
sential : first, a regular and sufficient supply 
of nutriment, and, secondly, an equally reg- 
ular and sufficient removal of waste. Insuf- 
ficient nourishment starves the blood; 
insufficient elimination poisons it. A wise 
housekeeper will look as carefully after the 
condition of his drains as after the quality 
of his food. 



( 



CHIEFLY PHYSIOLOGICAL. 47 



The principal organs of elimination, com- 
mon to both sexes, are the bowels, kidneys, 
lungs, and skin. A neglect of their functions 
is punished in each alike. To woman is in- 
trusted the exclusive management of another 
process of elimination, viz., the catamenial 
function. This, using the blood for its chan- 
nel of operation, performs, like the blood, dou- 
ble duty. It is necessary to ovulation, and to 
the integrity of every part of the reproductive 
apparatus ; it also serves as a means of elimi- 
nation for the blood itself. A careless man- 
agement of this function, at any period of life 
during its existence, is apt to be followed by 
consequences that may be serious ; but a neg- 
lect of it during the epoch of development, 
that is, from the age of fourteen to eighteen or 
twenty, not only produces great evil at the 
time of the neglect, but leaves a large legacy of 
evil to the future. The system is then peculiar- 
ly susceptible; and disturbances of the delicate 
mechanism we are considering, induced during 
the catamenial weeks of that critical age by 
constrained positions, muscular effort, brain 



48 SEX IN EDUCATION. 

work, and all forms of mental and physical 
excitement, germinate a host of ills. Some- 
times these causes, which pervade more or less 
the methods of instruction in our public and 
private schools, which our social customs ig- 
nore, and to which operatives of all sorts pay 
little heed, produce an excessive performance 
of the catamenial function ; and this is equiv- 
alent to a periodical hemorrhage. Sometimes 
they produce an insufficient performance of 
it ; and this, by closing an avenue of elimina- 
tion, poisons the blood, and depraves the or- 
ganization. The host of ills thus induced are 
known to physicians and to the sufferers as 
amenorrhoea, menorrhagia, dysmenorrhcea, 
hysteria, anemia, chorea, and the like. Some 
of these fasten themselves on their victim for 
a lifetime, and some are shaken off. Now and 
then they lead to an abortion of the function, 
and consequent sterility. Fortunate is the 
girls' school or college that does not furnish 
abundant examples of these sad cases. The 
more completely" any s" ich school or college 
succeeds, while adopting every detail and 



CHIEFLY PHYSIOLOGICAL, 49 

method of a boy's school, in ignoring and neg- 
lecting the physiological conditions of sexual 
development, the larger will be the number 
of these pathological cases among its gradu- 
ates. Clinical illustrations of these state- 
ments will be given in another place. 

The mysterious process which physiologists 
call metamorphosis of tissue, or intestitial 
change, deserves attention in connection with 
our subject. It interests both sexes alike. 
Unless it goes on normally, neither boys, 
girls, men, nor women, can have bodies or 
brains worth talking about. It is a process, 
without which not a step can be taken, or 
muscle moved, or food digested, or nutriment 
assimilated, or any function, physical or men- 
tal, performed. By its aid, growth and devel- 
opment are carried on. Youth, maturity, and 
old age result from changes in its character. 
It is alike the support and the guide of health, 
convalescence, and disease. It is the means 
by which, in the human system, force is de- 
veloped, and growth and decay rendered pos- 
sible. The process, in itself, is one of the 



60 SEX IN EDUCATION, 

simplest. It is merely the replacing of one 
microscopic cell by another; and yet upon 
this simple process hang the issues of life and 
death, of thought and power. 

Carpenter, in his physiology, reports the 
discovery, which we owe to German investi- 
gation, " that the whole structure originates 
in a single cell ; that this cell gives birth to 
others, analogous to itself, and these again 
to many future generations ; and that all the 
varied tissues of the animal body are devel- 
oped from cells."* A more recent writer 
adds, "In the higher animals and plants, we 
are presented with structures which may be 
regarded as essentially aggregates of cells ; 
and there is now a physiological division of 
labor, some of the cells being concerned with 
the nutriment of the organism, whilst others 
are set apart, and dedicated to the function 
of reproduction. Every cell in such an 
aggregate leads a life, which, in a certain 
limited sense, may be said to be independent ; 
and each discharges its own function in the 

* Carpenter's Human Physiology, p. 455. 



CHIEFLY PHYSIOLOGICAL. 51 

general economy. Each cell lias a period of 
development, growth, and active life, and 
each ultimately perishes; the life of the 
organism not only not depending upon the 
life of its elemental factors, but actually 
being kept up by their constant destruction 
and as constant renewal." * Growth, health, 
and disease are cellular manifestations. With 
every act of life, the movement of a finger, 
the pulsation of a heart, the uttering of a 
word, the coining of a thought, the thrill of 
an emotion, there is the destruction of a cer- 
tain number of cells. Their destruction 
evolves or sets free the force that we recog- 
nize as movement, speech, thought, and 
emotion. The number of cells destroyed 
depends upon the intensity and duration of 
the effort that correlates their destruction. 
When a blacksmith wields a hammer for an 
hour, he uses up the number of cells neces- 
sary to yield that amount of muscular force. 
When a girl studies Latin for an hour, she 
uses up the number of brain-cells necessary 

* Nicholson, Study of Biology, p, 79. 



52 SEX IN EDUCATION. 

to yield that amount of intellectual force. 
As fast as one cell is destroyed, another is 
generated. The death of one is followed 
instantly by the birth of its successor. This 
continual process of cellular death and birth, 
the income and outgo of cells, that follow 
each other like the waves of the sea, each 
different yet each the same, is metamorphosis 
of tissue. This is life. It corresponds very 
nearly to Bichat's definition that, " life is 
organization in action." The finer sense of 
Shakspeare dictated a truer definition than 
the science of the French physiologist, — 

" What's yet in this 
That bears the name of life ? Yet in this life 
Lie hid more thousand deaths." 

Measure for Measure^ Act iii. Scene 1. 

No physical or psychical act is possible 
without this change. It is a process of con- 
tinual waste and repair. Subject to its in- 
evitable power, the organization is continually 
wasting away and continually being repaired. 

The old notion that our bodies are changed 



CHIEFLY PHYSIOLOGICAL. 53 

every seven years, science has long since ex- 
ploded. " The matter," said Mr. John 
Goodsir, "of the organized frame to its 
minutest parts is in a continual flux." Our 
bodies are never the same for any two suc- 
cessive days. The feet that Mary shall 
dance with next Christmas Eve will not be 
the same feet that bore her triumphantly 
through the previous Christmas holidays. 
The brain that she learns German with to- 
day does not contain a cell in its convolu- 
tions that was spent in studying French one 
year ago. Whether her present feet can 
dance better or worse than those of a year 
ago, and whether her present brain can do 
more or less German and French than the 
one of the year before, depends upon how 
she has used her feet and brain during the 
intervening time, that is, upon the metamor- 
phosis of her tissue. 

From birth to adult age, the cells of 
muscle, organ, and brain that are spent in the 
activities of life, such as digesting, growing, 
studying, playing, working, and the like, are 



54 SEX IN EDUCATION, 

replaced by others of better quality and 
larger number. At least, such is the case 
where metamorphosis is permitted to go on 
normally. The result is growth and develop- 
ment. This growing period or formative 
epoch extends from birth to the age of 
twenty or twenty-five years. Its duration is 
shorter for a girl than for a boy. She ripens 
quicker than he. In the four years from 
fourteen to eighteen, she accomplishes an 
amount of physiological cell change and 
growth which Nature does not require of a 
boy in less than twice that number of years. 
It is obvious, that to secure the best kind of 
growth during this period, and the best de- 
velopment at the end of it, the waste of 
tissue produced by study, work, and fashion 
must not be so great that repair will only 
equal it. It is equally obvious that a girl 
upon whom Nature, for a limited period and 
for a definite purpose, imposes so great a 
physiological task, will not have as much 
powei^ left for the tasks of the school, as the 
boy of whom Nature requires less at the 



CHIEFLY PHYSIOLOGICAL. 55 

corresponding epoch. A margin must be 
allowed for growth. The repair must be 
greater and better than the waste. 

During middle age, life's active period, 
there is an equilibrium between the body's 
waste and repair: one equals the other. 
The machine, when properly managed, then 
holds its own. A French physiologist fixea 
the close of this period for the ideal man of 
the future at eighty, when, he says, old age 
begins. Few have such inherited power, and 
live with such physiological wisdom, as to 
keep their machine in good repair, — in good 
working-order, — to that late period. From 
the age of twenty-five or thirty, however, to 
that of sixty or sixty-five, this equilibrium 
occurs. Repair then equals waste; recon- 
struction equals destruction. The female or- 
ganization, like the male, is now developed : 
its tissues are consolidated ; its functions are 
established. With decent care, it can per- 
form an immense amount of physical and 
mental labor. It is now capable of its best 
work. But, in order to do its best, it must 



56 SEX IN EDUCATION. 

obey the law of periodicity ; just as the 
male organization, to do its best, must obey 
the law of sustained effort. 

When old age begins, whether, normally, 
at seventy or eighty, or, prematurely, at fifty 
or thirty, repair does not equal waste, and 
degeneration of tissue results. More cells 
are destroyed by wear and tear than are 
made up from nutriment. The friction of 
the machine rubs the stuff of life away faster 
than it can be replaced. The muscles stiffen, 
the hair turns white, the joints crack, the 
arteries ossify, the nerve-centres harden or 
soften: all sorts of degeneration creep on 
till death appears, — Mors janua vitce. There , 
the curves unite, and men and women are 
alike again. 

Sleep, whose inventor received the bene- 
diction of Sancho Panza, and whose power 
Dryden apostrophized, — 

" Of all the powers the best : 
Oh I peace of mind, repairer of decay, 
Whose balm renews the limbs to labor of the day," — 

is a most important physiological factor. 



CHIEFLY PHYSIOLOGICAL. 57 

Our schools are as apt in frightening it away 
as our churches are in inviting it. Sleep is 
the opportunity for repair. During its hours 
of quiet rest, when muscular and nervous 
effort are stilled, millions of microscopic cells 
are busy in the penetralia of the organism, 
like coral insects in the depths of the sea, 
repairing the waste which the day's study and 
work have caused. Dr. B. W. Kichardson of 
London, one of the most ingenious and ac- 
complished physiologists of the present day, 
describes the labor of sleep in the following 
language : " During this period of natural 
sleep, the most important changes of nutri- 
tion are in progress : the body is renovating, 
and, if young, is actually growing. If the 
body be properly covered, the animal heat 
is being conserved, and laid up for expendi- 
ture during the waking hours that are to 
follow ; the respiration is reduced, the in- 
spirations being lessened in the proportion of 
six to seven, as compared with the number 
made when the body is awake ; the action 
of the heart is reduced ; the voluntary 



58 SEX IN EDUCATION, 

muscles, relieved of all fatigue, and with the 
extensors more relaxed than the flexors, are 
undergoing repair of structure, and recruit- 
ing their excitability ; and the voluntary ner- 
vous system, dead for the time to the 
external vibration, or, as the older men called 
it, ' stimulus' from without, is also under- 
going rest and repair, so that, when it comes 
again into work, it may receive better the 
impressions it may have to gather up, and 
influence more effectively the muscles it may 
be called upon to animate, direct, control." * 
An American observer and physiologist. Dr. 
William A. Hammond, confirms the views 
of his English colleague. He tells us that 
" the state of general repose which accom- 
panies sleep is of especial value to the or- 
ganism, in allowing the nutrition of the ner- 
vous tissue to go on at a greater rate than its 
destructive metamorphosis." In another 
place he adds, " For the brain, there is no 
rest except during sleep." And, again, he 
says, " The more active the mind, the 

* Popular Science MontUy, August, 1872, p. 411. 



CHIEFLY PHYSIOLOGICAL. 59 

greater the necessity for sleep ; just as with 
a steamer, the greater the number of revolu- 
tions its engine makes, the more imperative 
is the demand for fuel." * These statements 
justify and explain the instinctive demand 
for sleep. They also show why it is that 
infants require more sleep than children, and 
children than middle-age folk, and middle- 
age folk than old people. Infants must have 
sleep for repair and rapid growth ; children, 
for repair and moderate growth ; middle-age 
folk, for repair without growth; and old 
people, only for the minimum of repair. 
Girls, between the ages of fourteen and eight- 
een, must have sleep, not only for repair and 
growth, like boys, but for the additional task 
of constructing, or, more properly speaking, 
of developing and perfecting then, a repro- 
ductive system, — the engine within an en- 
gine. The bearing of this physiological fact 
upon education is obvious. Work of the 
school is work of the brain. Work of the 
brain eats the brain away. Sleep is the chance 



* Sleep and its Derangements, pp. 9, 10, 13. 



60 SEX IN EDUCATION, 

and laboratory of repair. If a child's brain- 
work and sleep are normally proportioned to 
each other, each night will more than make 
good each day's loss. Clear heads will greet 
each welcome morn. But if the reverse 
occurs, the night will not repair the day; 
and aching heads will signalize the advance 
of neuralgia, tubercle, and disease. So Nature 
punishes disobedience. 

It is apparent, from these physiological 
considerations, that, in order to give girls a 
fair chance in education, four conditions at 
least must be observed: first, a sufficient 
supply of appropriate nutriment ; secondly, a 
normal management of the catamenial func- 
tions, including the building of the reproduc- 
tive apparatus ; thirdly, mental and physical 
work so apportioned, that repair shall exceed 
waste, and a margin be left for general and 
sexual development ; and fourthly, sufficient 
sleep. Evidence of the results brought about 
by a disregard of these conditions will next 
be given. 



PART III. 

CHIEFLY CLINICAL. 

"Et I'on nous persuadera difficilement que lorsque lea 
hommes ont taut de peine a etre hdmmes, les femmes puis- 
sent, tout en restant femmes, devenir hommes aussi, mettant 
amsi la mam sur les deux roles, exer9ant la double mission, 
resumant le double caractere de I'humanitd ! Nous perdrons 
la femme, et nous n'aurons pas Thomme. Voila ce qui 
nous arrivera. On nous donnera ce quelque chose de mon- 
streux, cet etre repugnant, qui deja parait ^ notre horizon." 
— Le Comte a. De Gaspaein. 

"Facts given in evidence are premises from which a 
conclusion is to be drawn. The first step in the exercise of 
this duty is to acquire a belief of the truth of the facts." — 
Bam, on Facts. 

Clinical observation confirms tlie teach- 
ings of physiology. The sick chamber, not 
the schoolroom ; the physician's private con- 
sultation, not the committee's public exam- 
ination; the hospital, not the college, the 

61 



62 SEX IN EDUCATION, 

worksliop, or the parlor, — disclose the sad 
results which modern social customs, modern 
education, and modern ways of labor, have 
entailed on women. Examples of them may 
be found in every walk of life. On the lux- 
urious couches of Beacon Street ; in the pal- 
aces of Fifth Avenue ; among the classes of 
our private, common, and normal schools; 
among the female graduates of our colleges ; 
behind the counters of Washington Street 
and Broadway ; in our factories, workshops, 
and homes, — may be found numberless pale, 
weak, neuralgic, dyspeptic, hysterical, men- 
orraghic, dysmenorrhoeic girls and women, 
that are living illustrations of the truth of 
this brief monograph. It is not asserted here 
that improper methods of study, and a disregard 
of the reproductive apparatus and its func- 
tions, during the educational life of girls, are 
the sole causes of female diseases ; neither is 
it asserted that all the female graduates of 
our schools and colleges are pathological 
specimens. But it is asserted that the num- 
ber of these graduates who have been per- 



CHIEFLY CLINICAL, 63 

manently disabled to a greater or less degree 
by these causes is so great, as to excite the 
gravest alarm, and to demand the serious 
attention of the community. If these causes 
should continue for the next half-century, 
and increase in the same ratio as they have 
for the last fifty years, it requires no prophet 
to foretell that the wives who are to be 
mothers in our republic must be drawn from 
trans-atlantic homes. The sons of the New 
World will have to re-act, on a magnificent 
scale, the old story of unwived Rome and the 
Sabines. 

We have previously seen that the blood is 
the life, and that the loss of it is the loss of 
so much life. Deluded by strange theories, 
and groping in physiological darkness, our 
fathers' physicians were too often Sangrados. 
Nourishing food, pure air, and haematized 
blood were stigmatized as the friends of dis- 
ease and the enemies of convalescence. Ox- 
ygen was shut out from and carbonic acid 
shut into the chambers of phthisis and fever ; 
and veins were opened, that the currents of 



/ 



64 SEX IN EDUCATION. 

blood and disease might flow out together. 
Happily, those days of ignorance, which God 
winked at, and which the race survived, 
have passed by. Air and food and blood are 
recognized as Nature's restoratives. No 
physician would dare, nowadays, to bleed 
either man or woman once a month, year in 
and year out, for a quarter of a century con- 
tinuously. But girls often have the courage, 
or the ignorance, to do this to themselves. 
And the worst of it is, that the organization 
of our schools and workshops, and the de- 
mands of social life and polite society, encour- 
age them in this slow suicide. It has already 
been stated that the excretory organs, by 
constantly eliminating from the system its 
effete and used material, the measure and 
source of its force, keep the machine in 
clean, healthy, and working order, and that 
the reproductive apparatus of woman uses 
the blood as one of its agents of elimination. 
Kept within natural limits, this elimination is 
a source of strength, a perpetual fountain of 
health, a constant renewal of life. Beyond 



CHIEFLY CLINICAL. %^ 

these limits it is a hemorrhage, that, by drain- 
ing away the life, becomes a source of weak- 
ness and a perpetual fountain of disease. 

The following case illustrates one of the 
ways in which our present school methods of 
teaching girls generate a menorrhagia and 

its consequent evils. Miss A , a healthy, 

bright, intelligent girl, entered a female 
school, an institution that is commonly but 
oddly called a seminary for girls, in the State 
of New York, at the age of fifteen. She was 
then sufficiently-well developed, and had a 
good color ; all the functions appeared to act 
normally, and the catamenia were fairly es- 
tablished. She was ambitious as well as ca- 
pable, and aimed to be among the first in the 
school. Her temperament was what physi- 
ologists call nervous, — an expression that 
does not denote a fidgety make, but refers. 
to a relative activity of the nervous system. 
She was always anxious about her recitations. 
No matter how carefully she prepared for 
them, she was ever fearful lest she should 
trip a little, and appear to less advantage 

5 



66 8EX IN EDUCATION, 

than she hoped. She went to school regu- 
larly every week, and every day of the school 
year, just as boys do. She paid no more 
attention to the periodical tides of her organi- 
zation than her companions ; and that was 
none at all. She recited standing at all times, 
or at least whenever a standing recitation 
was the order of the hour. She soon found, 
and this history is taken from her own lips, 
that for a few days during every fourth week, 
the effort of reciting produced an extraordi- 
nary physical result. The attendant anxiety 
and excitement relaxed the sluices of the 
system that were already physiologically 
open, and determined a hemorrhage as the 
concomitant of a recitation. Subjected to 
the inflexible rules of the school, unwilling 
to seek advice from any one, almost ashamed 
of her own physique, she ingeniously pro- 
tected herself against exposure, and went on 
intellectually leading her companions, and 
physically defying nature. At the end of a 
year, she went home with a gratifying report 
from her teachers, and pale cheeks and a 



CHIEFLY CLINICAL, 67 

variety of aches. Her parents were pleased, 
and perhaps a little anxious. She is a good 
scholar, said her father ; somewhat over- 
worked possibly ; and so he gave her a trip 
among the mountains, and a week or two at 
the seashore. After her vacation she re- 
turned to school, and repeated the previous 
year's experience, — constant, sustained work, 
recitation and study for all days alike, a hem- 
orrhage once a month that would make the 
stroke oar of the University crew falter, and 
a brilliant scholar. Before the expiration of 
the second year, Nature began to assert her 
authority. The paleness of Miss A's com- 
plexion increased. An unaccountable and 
uncontrollable twitching of a rhythmical 
sort got into the muscles of her face, and 
made her hands go and feet jump. She was 
sent home, and her physician called, who at 
once diagnosticated chorea (St. Vitus' dance), 
and said she had studied too hard, and 
wisely prescribed no study and a long vaca- 
tion. Her parents took her to Europe. A 
year of the sea and the Alps, of England 



68 SEX IN EDUCATION. 

and the Continent, the Rhine and Italy, 
worked like a charm. The sluiceways were 
controlled, the blood saved, and color and 
health returned. She came back seemingly 
well, and at the age of eighteen went to her 
old school once more. During all this time 
not a word had been said to her by her 
parents, her physician, or her teachers, about 
any periodical care of herself ; and the rules 
of the school did not acknowledge the cata- 
menia. The labor and regimen of the school 
soon brought on the old menorrhagic trouble 
in the old way, with the addition of occa- 
sional faintings to emphasize Nature's warn- 
ings. She persisted in getting her education, 
however, and graduated at nineteen, the 
first scholar, and an invalid. Again her 
parents were gratified and anxious. She is 
overworked, said they, and wondered why 
girls break down so. To insure her recovery, 
a second and longer travel was undertaken. 
Egypt and Asia were added to Europe, and 
nearly two years were allotted to the cure. 
With change of air and scene her health im- 



CHIEFLY CLimCAL. 69 

proved, but not so rapidly as with the pre- 
vious journey. She returned to America 
better than she went away, and married at 
the age of twenty-two. Soon after that time 
she consulted the writer on account of pro- 
longed dyspepsia, neuralgia, and dysmenor- 
rhoea, which had replaced menorrhagia. Then 
I learned the long history of her education, 
and of her efforts to study just as boys do. 
Her attention had never been called before to 
the danger she had incurred while at school. 
She is now what is called getting better, 
but has the delicacy and weaknesses of 
American women, and, so far, is without 
children. 

It is not difficult, in this case, either to dis- 
cern the cause of the trouble, or to trace its 
influence, through the varying phases of 

disease, from Miss A 's school-days, to 

her matronly life. She was well, and would 
have been called robust, up to her first critical 
period. She then had two tasks imposed 
upon her at once, both of which required for 
their perfect accomplishment a few years of 



70 SEX IN EDUCATION. 

time and a large share of vital force : one 
was the education of the brain, the other of 
the reproductive system. The schoolmaster 
superintended the first, and Nature the 
second. The school, with puritanic inflexi- 
bility, demanded every day of the month ; 
Nature, kinder than the school, demanded 
less than a fourth of the time, — a seventh 
or an eighth of it would have probably 
answered. The schoolmaster might have 
yielded somewhat, but would not; Nature 
could not. The pupil, therefore, was com- 
pelled to undertake both tasks at the same 
time. Ambitious, earnest, and conscientious, 
she obeyed the visible power and authority 
of the school, and disobeyed, or rather igno- 
rantly sought to evade, the invisible power 
and authority of her organization. She put 
her will into the education of her brain, and 
withdrew it from elsewhere. The system 
does not do two things well at the same time. 
One or the other suffers from neglect, when 

the attempt is made. Miss A made her 

brain and muscles work actively, and diverted 



CHIEFLY CLINICAL. 71 

blood and force to them when her organiza- 
tion demanded active work, with blood and 
force for evolution in another region. At 
first the schoolmaster seemed to be success- 
ful. He not only made his pupil's brain 
manipulate Latin, chemistry, philosophy, 
geography, grammar, arithmetic, music, 
French, German, and the whole extraordi- 
nary catalogue of an American young lady's 
school curriculum, with acrobatic skill ; but 
he made her do this irrespective of the peri- 
odical tides of her organism, and made her 
perform her intellectual and muscular calis- 
thenics, obliging her to stand, walk, and 
recite, at the seasons of highest tide. For a 
while she got on nicely. Presently, how- 
ever, the strength of the loins, that even 
Solomon put in as a part of his ideal woman, 
changed to weakness. Periodical hemor- 
rhages were the first warning of this. As 
soon as loss of blood occurred regularly and 
largely, the way to imperfect development 
and invalidism was open, and the progress 
easy and rapid. The nerves and their centres 



72 SEX m EDUCATION-. 

lacked nourisliment. There was more waste 
than repair, — no margin for growth. St. 
Vitus' dance was a warning not to be neg- 
lected, and the schoolmaster resigned to the 
doctor. A long vacation enabled the system 
to retrace its steps, and recover force for evo- 
lution. Then the school resumed its sway, 
and physiological laws were again defied. 
Fortunately graduation soon occurred, and 
unintermitted, sustained labor was no longer 
enforced. The menorrhagia ceased, but per- 
sistent dysmenorrhea now indicates the 
neuralgic friction of an imperfectly devel- 
oped reproductive apparatus. Doubtless the 
evil of her education will infect her whole 
life. 

The next case is drawn from different 
social surroundings. Early associations and 

natural aptitude inclined Miss B to the 

stage ; and the need of bread and butter sent 
her upon it as a child, at what age I do not 
know. At -fifteen she was an actress, deter- 
mined to do her best, and ambitious of suc- 
cess. She strenuously taxed muscle and 



CHIEFLY CLINIGAL, 73 

brain at all times in her calling. She worked 
in a man's sustained way, ignoring all de- 
mands for special development, and essaying 
first to dis-establish, and then to bridle, the 
catamenia. At twenty she was eminent. 
The excitement and effort of acting periodi- 
cally produced the same result with her that 
a recitation did under similar conditions with 

Miss A . If she had been a physiologist, 

she would have known how this course of 
action would end. As she was an actress, and 
not a physiologist, she persisted in the slow 
suicide of frequent hemorrhages, and encour- 
aged them by her method of professional edu- 
cation, and later by her method of practising 
her profession. She tried to ward off disease, 
and repair the loss of force, by consulting 
various doctors, taking drugs, and resorting 
to all sorts of expedients ; but the hemor- 
rhages continued, and were repeated at irreg- 
ular and abnormally frequent intervals. A 
careful local examination disclosed no local 
disturbance. There was neither ulceration, 
hypertrophy, or congestion of the os or cervix 



74 SEX IN EDUCATION, 

uteri; no displacement of any moment, or 
ovarian tenderness. In spite of all her diffi- 
culties, however, she worked on courageously 
and steadily in a man's way and with a 
woman's will. After a long and discouraging 
experience of doctors, work, and weaknesses, 
when rather over thirty years old, she came 
to Boston to consult the writer, who learned 
at that time the details just recited. She 
was then pale and weak. A murmur in the 
veins, which a French savan, by way of 
dedication to the Devil, christened hruit de 
diahle, a baptismal name that science has 
retained, was audible over her jugulars, and 
a similar murmur over her heart. Palpitation 
and labored respiration accompanied and 
impeded effort. She complained most of her 
head, which felt " queer," would not go to 
sleep as formerly, and often gave her turns, 
in which there was a mingling of dizziness, 
semi-consciousness, and fear. Her education 
and work, or rather method of work, had 
wrought out for her anemia and epileptiform 
attacks. She got two or three physiological 



CHIEFLY CLINICAL. 75 

lectures, was ordered to take iron, and other 
noiirisliing food, allow time for sleep, and, 
above all, to arrange her professional work in 
harmony with the rythmical or periodical 
action of woman's constitution. She made 
the effort to do this, and, in six months, re- 
ported herself in better health — though far 
from well — than she had been for six years 
before. 

This case scarcely requires analysis in order 
to see how it bears on the question of a girl's 
education and woman's work. A gifted and 
healthy girl, obliged to get her education and 
earn her bread at the same time, labored upon 
the two tasks zealously, perhaps over-much, 
and did this at the epoch when the female 
organization is busy with the development of 
its reproductive apparatus. Nor is this all. 
She labored continuously, yielding nothing to 
Nature's periodical demand for force. She 
worked her engine up to highest pressure, 
just as much at flood-tide as at other times. 
Naturally there was not nervous power enough 
developed in the uterine and associated gan- 



76 SEX IN EDUCATION. 

glia to restrain the laboring orifices of the cir- 
culation, to close the gates ; and the flood of 
blood gushed through. With the frequent 
repetition of the flooding, came inevitably the 
evils she suffered from, — Nature's penalties. 
She now reports herself better ; but whether 
convalescence will continue will depend upon 
her method of work for the future. 

Let us take the next illustration from a 
walk in life different from either of the fore- 
going. Miss C was a bookkeeper in a 

mercantile house. The length of time she 
remained in the employ of the house, and its 
character, are a sufficient guaranty that she did 
her work well. Like the other clerks, she 
was at her post, standing^ during business 
hours, from Monday morning till Saturday 
night. The female pelvis being wider than 
that of the male, the weight of the body, in the 
upright posture, tends to press the upper ex- 
tremities of the thighs out laterally in females 
more than in males. Hence the former can 
stand less long with comfort than the latter. 
Miss C , however, believed in doing her 



CHIEFLY CLINICAL, 77 

work in a man's way, infected by the not un- 
common notion that womanliness means manli- 
ness. Moreover, she would not, or could not, 
make any more allowance for the periodicity 
of her organization than for the shape of her 
skeleton. When about twenty years of age, 
perhaps a year or so older, she applied to me 
for advice in consequence of neuralgia, back- 
ache, menorrhagia, leucorrhoea, and general 
debility. She was anemic, and looked pale, 
care-worn, and anxious. There was no evi- 
dence of any local organic affection of the 
pelvic organs. " Get a woman's periodical 
remission from labor, if intermission is impos- 
sible, and do your work in a woman's way, 
not copying a man's fashion, and you will 
need very little apothecary's stuff," was the 
advice she received. " I must go on as I am 
doing," was her answer. She tried iron, sitz- 
baths, and the like : of course they were of no 
avail. Latterly I have lost sight of her, and, 
from her appearance at her last visit to me, 
presume she has gone to a world where back- 
ache and male and female skeletons are un- 
known. 



78 SEX IN EDUCATION, 

Illustrations of this sort might be multiplied ; 
but these three are sufficient to show how an 
abnormal method of study and work may and 
does open the flood-gates of the system, and, 
by letting blood out, lets all sorts of evil in. 
Let us now look at another phase ; for menor- 
rhagia and its consequences are not the only 
punishments that girls receive for being edu- 
cated and worked just like boys. Nature's 
methods of punishing men and women are as. 
numerous as their organs and functions, and 
her penalties as infinite in number and gra- 
dation as her blessings. 

Amenorrhoea is perhaps more common than 
menorrhagia. It often happens, however, 
during the first critical epoch, which is isoch- 
ronal with the technical educational period 
of a girl, that after a few occasions of cata- 
menial hemorrhage, moderate perhaps but still 
hemorrhage, which are not heeded, the con- 
servative force of Nature steps in, and saves 
the blood by arresting the function. In such 
instances, amenorrhoea is a result of menor- 
rhagia. In this way, and in others that we 



CHIEFLY CLINICAL. 79 

need not stop to inquire into, the regimen of 
our schools, colleges, and social life, that re- 
quires girls to walk, work, stand, study, recite, 
and dance at all times as boys can and should, 
may shut the uterine portals of the blood up, 
and keep poison in, as well as open them, and 
let life out. Which of these two evils is 
worse in itself, and which leaves the largest 
legacy of ills behind, it is difficult to say. 
Let us examine some illustrations of this sort 
of arrest. 

Miss D entered Vassar College at the 

age of fourteen. Up to that age, she had 
been a healthy girl, judged by the standard 
of American girls. Her parents were appar- 
ently strong enough to yield her a fair dower 
of force. The catamenial function first 
showed signs of activity in her Sophomore 
Year, when she was fifteen years old. Its 
appearance at this age * is confirmatory evi- 

* It appears, from tlie researches of Mr. Whitehead on 
this point, that an examination of four thousand cases gave 
fifteen years six and three-quarter months as the average 
age in England for the appearance of the catameaia. — 
Whitehead, on Abortion, Sfc. 



80 SEX Iir EDUCATION. 

dence of tlie normal state of her health at 
that period of her college career. Its com- 
mencement was normal, without pain or ex- 
cess. She performed all her college duties 
regularly and steadily. She studied, recited, 
stood at the blackboard, walked, and went 
through her gymnastic exercises, from the 
beginning to the end of the term, just as 
boys do. Her account of her regimen there 
was so nearly that of a boy's regimen, that 
it would puzzle a physiologist to determine, 
from the account alone, whether the subject 
of it was male or female. She was an aver- 
age scholar, who maintained a fair position 
in her- class, not one of the anxious sort, that 
are ambitious of leading all the rest. Her 
first warning was fainting away, while exer- 
cising in the gymnasium, at a time when she 
should have been comparatively quiet, both 
mentally and physically. This warning was 
repeated several times, under the same cir- 
cumstances. Finally she was compelled to 
renounce gymnastic exercises altogether. In 
her Junior Year, the organism's periodical 



CHIEFLY CLINICAL. 81 

function began to be performed with pain, 
moderate at first, but more and more severe 
with each returning month. When between 
seventeen and eighteen years old, dysmenor- 
rhcea was established as the order of that 
function. Coincident with the appearance 
of pain, there was a diminution of excretion ; 
and, as the former increased, the latter be- 
came more marked. In other respects she 
was well ; and, in all respects, she appeared 
to be well to her companions and to the 
faculty of the college. She graduated before 
nineteen, with fair honors and a poor phy- 
sique. The year succeeding her graduation 
was one of steadily- advancing invalidism. 
She was tortui'ed for two or three days out 
of every month ; and, for two or three days 
after each season of torture, was weak and 
miserable, so that about one sixth or fifth of 
her time was consumed in this way. The 
excretion from the blood, which had been 
gradually lessening, after a time substan- 
tially stopped, though a periodical effort to 
keep it up was made. She now suffered 



82 SEX IN EDUCATION. 

from what is called amenorrlioea. At the 
same time she became pale, hysterical, ner- 
vous in the ordinary sense, and almost con- 
stantly complained of headache. Physicians 
were applied to for aid : drugs were adminis- 
tered; travelling, with consequent change of 
air and scene, was undertaken ; and all with 
little apparent avail. After this experi- 
ence, she was brought to Boston for advice, 
when the writer first saw her, and learned all 
these details. She presented no evidence of 
local uterine congestion, inflammation, ulcer- 
ation, or displacement. The evidence was 
altogether in favor of an arrest of the devel- 
opment of the reproductive apparatus, at a 
stage when the development was nearly com- 
plete. Confirmatory proof of such an arrest 
was found in examining her breast, where 
the milliner had supplied the organs Nature 
should have grown. It is unnecessary for 
our present purpose to detaQ what treatment 
was advised. It is sufficient to say, that she 
probably never will become physically what 
she would have been had her education being 
phj^siologically guided. 



CHIEFLY CLINICAL. 83 

TMs case needs very little comment : its 

teachings are obvious. Miss D went to 

college in good physical condition. During 
the four years of her college life, her parents 
and the college faculty required her to get 
what is popularly called an education. Na- 
ture required her, during the same period, 
to build and put in working-order a large and 
complicated reproductive mechanism, a mat- 
ter that is popularly ignored, — shoved out of 
sight like a disgrace. She naturally obeyed 
the requirements of the faculty, which she 
could see, rather than the requirements of 
the mechanism within her, that she could not 
see. Subjected to the college regimen, she 
worked four years in getting a liberal educa- 
tion. Her way of work was sustained and con- 
tinuous, and out of harmony with the rhyth- 
mical periodicity of the female organization. 
The stream of vital and constructive force 
evolved within her was turned steadily to the 
brain, and away from the ovaries and their ac- 
cessories. The result of this sort of educa- 
tion was, that these last-mentioned organs, 



84 SEX IN EDUCATION. 

deprived of sufficient opportunity and nutri- 
ment, first began to perform their functions 
with pain, a warning of error that was un- 
heeded ; then, to cease to grow ; * next, to set 
up once a month a grumbling torture that 
made life miserable ; and, lastly, the brain 
and the whole nervous system, disturbed, in 
obedience to the law, that, if one member 
suffers, all the members suffer, became neu- 
ralgic and hysterical. And so Miss D • 

spent the few years next succeeding her 
graduation in conflict with dysmenorrhoea, 
headache, neuralgia, and hysteria. Her 
parents marvelled at her ill-heath; and she 



* The arrest of development of the uterus, in connection 
with amenorrhoea, is sometimes very marked. In the New- 
York MedicalJournal for June, 1873, three such cases are 
recorded, that came under the eye of those excellent ob- 
servers, Dr. E. E. Peaslee and Dr. T. G. Thomas. In one 
of these cases, the uterine cavity measured one and a half 
inches ; in another, one and seven-eighths inches ; and, in a 
third, one and a quarter inches. Recollecting that the normal 
measurement is from two and a half to three inches, it ap- 
pears that the arrest of development in these cases occurred 
when the uterus was half or less than half grown. Liberal 
education should avoid such errors. 



CHIEFLY CLINICAL. 85 

furnished another te^t for the often-repeated 
sermon on the delicacy of American girls. 

It may not be unprofitable to give the his- 
tory of one more case of this sort. Miss 

E ■ had an hereditary right to a good 

brain and to the best cultivation of it. Her 
father was one of our ripest and broadest 
American scholars, and her mother one of 
our most accomplished American women. 
They both enjoyed excellent health. Their 
daughter had a literary training, — an intel- 
lectual, moral, and aesthetic half of educa- 
tion, such as their supervision would be 
likely to give, and one that few young men 
of her age receive. Her health did not 
seem to suffer at first. She studied, recited, 
walked, worked, stood, and the like, in the 
steady and sustained way that is normal to 
the male organization. She seemed to evolve 
force enough to acquire a number of lan- 
guages, to become familiar with the natural 
sciences, to take hold of philosophy and 
mathematics, and to keep in good physical 
case while doing all this. At the age of 



86 SEX IN EDUCATION. 

twenty-one she might have been presented 
to the public, on Commencement Day, by the 
president of Vassar College or of Antioch 
College or of Michigan University, as the 
wished-for result of American liberal female 
culture. Just at this time, however, the 
catamenial function began to show signs of 
failure of power. No severe or even mode- 
rate illness overtook her. She was subjected 
to no unusual strain. She was only follow- 
ing the regimen of continued and sustained 
work, regardless of Nature's periodical de- 
mands for a portion of her time and force, 
when, without any apparent cause, the fail- 
ure of power was manifested by moderate 
dysmenorrhoea and diminished excretion. 
Soon after this the function ceased altogeth- 
er ; and up to this present writing, a period 
of six or eight years, it has shown no more 
signs of activity than an amputated arm. 
In the course of a year or so after the cessa- 
tion of the function, her head began to 
trouble hei'. First there was headache, then 
a frequent congested condition, which she 



CHIEFLY CLINICAL. 87 

described as a " rush of blood " to her head ; 
and, by and by, vagaries and forebodings and 
despondent feelings began to crop out. Co- 
incident with this mental state, her skin 
became rough and coarse, and an inveterate 
acne covered her face. She retained her 
appetite, ability to exercise and sleep. A 
careful local examination of the pelvic or- 
gans, by an expert, disclosed no lesion or 
displacement there, no ovaritis or other 
inflammation. Appropriate treatment faith- 
fully persevered in was unsuccessful in re- 
covering the lost function. I was finally 
obliged to consign her to an asylum. 

The arrest of development of the repro- 
ductive system is most obvious to the super- 
ficial observer in that part of it which the 
milliner is called upon to cover up with 
pads, and which was alluded to in the case 
of Miss D . This, however, is too im- 
portant a matter to be dismissed with a bare 
allusion. A recent writer has pointed out 
the fact and its significance with great clear- 
ness. "There is another marked charge," 



88 SEX m education: 

says Dr. Nathan Allen, "going on in the 
female organization at the present day, 
which is very significant of something 
wrong. In the normal state, Nature has 
made ample provision in the structure of the 
female for nursing her offspring. In order to 
furnish this nourishment, pure in quality and 
abundant in quantity, she must possess a 
good development of the sanguine and lym- 
phatic temperament, together with vigorous 
and healthy digestive organs. Formerly 
such an organization was very generally 
possessed by American women, and they 
found but little difficulty in nursing their 
infants. It was only occasionally, in case of 
some defect in the organization, or where 
sickness of some kind' had overtaken the 
mother, that it became necessary to resort to 
the wet-nurse or to feeding by hand. And 
the English, the Scotch, the German, the 
Canadian French, and the Irish women now 
living in this country, generally nurse their 
children : the exceptions are rare. But how 
is it with our American women who become 



CHIEFLY CLINICAL. 89 

mothers ? To those who have never consid- 
ered this subject, and even to medical men 
who have never carefully looked into it, the 
facts, when correctly and fully presented, 
will be surprising. It has been supposed by 
some that all, or nearly all, our American wo- 
men could nurse their offspring just as well 
as not; that the disposition only was want- 
ing, and that they did not care about having 
the trouble or confinement necessarily at- 
tending it. But this is a great mistake. 
This very indifference or aversion shows 
something wrong in the organization as well 
as in the disposition : if the physical system 
were all right, the mind and natural instincts 
would generally be right also. While there 
may be here and there cases of this kind, 
such an indisposition is not always found. 
It is a fact, that large numbers of our wo- 
men are anxious to nurse their offspring, and 
make the attempt: they persevere for a 
while, — perhaps for weeks or months, — and 
then fail. . . . There is still another class 
that cannot nurse at all, having neither the 



90 SEX m EDUCATION. 

organs nor nourishment requisite even to 
make a beginning. . . . Why should there 
be such a difference between the women of 
our times and their mothers or grand- 
mothers ? Why should there be such a dif- 
ference between our American women and 
those of foreign origin residing in the same 
locality, and surrounded by the same exter- 
nal influences? The explanation is simple: 
they have not the right kind of organization ; 
there is a want of proper development of the 
lymphatic and sanguine temperaments, — a 
marked deficiency in the organs of nutrition 
and secretion. You cannot draw water 
without good, flowing springs. The hrain 
and nervous system have, for a long time, made 
relatively too large a demand upon the organs 
of digestion and assimilation, while the exer- 
cise and development of certain other tissues in 
the body have been sadly neglected. ... In 
consequence of the great neglect of physical 
exercise, and the continuous application to 
study, together with various other influences, 
large numbers of our American women have 



CHIEFLY CLINICAL, 91 

altogether an undue predominance of the 
nervous temperament. If only here and 
there an individual were found with such an 
organization, not much harm comparatively 
would, result ; but, when a majority or nearly 
all have it, the evil becomes one of no small 
magnitude." * And the evil, it should be 
added, is not simply the inability to nurse ; for, 
if one member suffers, all the members suffer. 
A woman, whether married or unmarried, 
whether called to the offices of maternity or 
relieved from them, who has been defrauded 
by her education or otherwise of such an 
essential part of her development, is not so 
much of a woman, intellectually and morally 
as well as physically, in consequence of this 
defect. Her nervous system and brain, her 
instincts and character, are on a lower plane, 
and incapable of their harmonious and best 
development, if she is possessed, on reach- 
ing adult age, of only a portion of a breast 
and an ovary, or none at all. 

* Physical Degeneracy. By Nathan Allen, M.D., Journal 
of Psychological Medicine. October, 1870. 



92 ^SEX IN EDUCATION, 

When arrested development of the repro- 
ductive system is nearly or quite complete, 
it produces a change in the character, and a 
loss of power, which it is easy to recognize, 
but difficult to describe. As this change is 
an occasional attendant or result of amenor- 
rhoea, when the latter, brought about at an 
early age, is part of an early arrest, it should 
not be passed by without an allusion. In 
these cases, which are not of frequent occur- 
rence at present, but which may be evolved 
by our methods of education more numer- 
ously in the future, the system tolerates the 
absence of the catamenia, and the consequent 
non-elimination of impurities from the blood. 
Acute or chronic disease, the ordinary result 
of this condition, is not set up, but, instead, 
there is a change in the character and devel- 
opment of the brain and nervous system. 
There are in individuals of this class less 
adipose and more muscular tissue than is 
commonly seen, a coarser skin, and, gen- 
erally, a tougher and more angular make- 
up. There is a corresponding change in 



CHIEFLY CLINICAL. 93 

the intellectual and psychical condition, — 
a dropping out of maternal instincts, and an 
appearance of Amazonian coarseness and 
force. Such persons are analogous to the 
sexless class of termites. Naturalists tell 
us that these insects are divided into males 
and females, and a third class called workers 
and soldiers, who have no reproductive appa- 
ratus, and who, in their structure and in- 
stincts, are unlike the fertile individuals. 

A closer analogy than this, however, exists 
between these human individuals and the 
eunuchs of Oriental civilization. Except the 
secretary of the treasury, in the cabinet of 
Candace, queen of Ethiopia, who was baptized 
while journeying, by Philip the deacon, none 
of that class have made any impression on the 
world's life, that history has recorded. It may 
be reasonably doubted if arrested development 
of the female reproductive system, producing 
a class of agenes,* not epicenes, will yield a 

* According to the biblical account, woman was formed 
by subtracting a rib from man. If, in the evolution of the 
future, a third division of the human race is to be formed by 
subtracting sex from woman, — the castration of femininity,— 



94 SEX IN EDUCATION 

better result of intellectual and moral power 
in the nineteenth, century, than the analogous 
class of Orientals exhibited. Clinical illus- 
trations of this type of arrested growth might 
be given, but my pen refuses the ungracious 
task. 

Another result of the present methods of 
educating girls, and one different from any 
of the preceding, remains to be noticed. 
Schools and colleges, as we have seen, require 
girls to work their brains with full force and 
sustained power, at the time when their 
organization periodically requires a portion of 
their force for the performance of a periodical 
function, and a portion of their power for the 
building up of a peculiar, complicated, and 
important mechanism, — the engine within 
an engine. They are required to do two 

I ventiire to propose tlie term agene (a without, yevog sex) as 
an appropriate designation for the new development. Count 
Gasparin prophesies it thus : " Quelque chose de monstreux* 
cet etre repugnant, qui deja parait a notre horizon," a free 
translation of Virgil's earlier description : — 
** Monstrum horrendum, informe, ingens, cui lumen ademtum,'* 

3d, 658 line. 



/ 

CHIEFLY CLINICAL, 95 

things equally well at tlie same time. They 
are urged to meditate a lesson and drive a 
machine simultaneously, and to do them both 
with all their force. Their organizations are 
expected to make good sound brains and 
nerves by working over the humanities, the 
sciences, and the arts, and, at the same time, 
to make good sound reproductive apparatuses, 
not only without any especial attention to 
the latter, but while all available force is 
withdrawn from the latter and sent to the 
former. It is not materialism to say, that, as 
the brain is, so will thought be. Without 
discussing the French physiologist's dictum, 
that the brain secretes thought as the liver 
does bile, we may be sure, that without brain 
there will be no thought. The quality of 
the latter depends on the quality of the for- 
mer. The metamorphoses of brain manifest, 
measure, limit, enrich, and color thought. 
Brain tissue, including both quantity and 
quality, correlates mental power. The brain 
is manufactured from the blood ; its quantity 
and quality are determined by the quantity 



96 SEX IN EDUCATION. 

and quality of its blood supply. Blood is 
made from food ; but it may be lost by care- 
less hemorrhage, or poisoned by deficient elim- 
ination. When frequently and largely lost 
or poisoned, as I have too frequent occasion 
to know it often is, it becomes impoverished, 
— anemic. Then the brain suffers, and men- 
tal power is lost. The steps are few and 
direct, from frequent loss of blood, im- 
poverished blood, and abnormal brain and 
nerve metamorphosis, to loss of mental force 
and nerve disease. Ignorance or carelessness 
.leads to anemic blood, and that to an anemic 
mind. As the blood, so the brain ; as the 
brain, so the mind. 

The cases which have hitherto been pre- 
sented illustrate some of the evils which the 
reproductive system is apt to receive in con- 
sequence of obvious derangement of its 
growth and functions. But it may, and often 
does, happen that the catamenia are normally 
performed, and that the reproductive system 
is fairly made up during the educational 
period. Then force is withdrawn from the 



CHIEFLY CLINICAL, 97 

brain and nerves and ganglia. These are 
dwarfed or checked or arrested in their 
development. In the process of waste and 
repair, of destructive and constructive met- 
amorphosis, by which brains as well as bones 
are built up and consolidated, education 
often leaves insufficient margin for growth. 
Income derived from air, food, and sleep, 
which should largely, may only mode- 
rately exceed expenditure upon study and 
work, and so leave but little surplus for 
growth in any direction; or, what more 
commonly occurs, the income which the brain 
receives is all spent upon study, and little or 
none upon its development, while that which 
the nutritive and reproductive systems re- 
ceive is retained by them, and devoted to 
their own growth. When the school makes 
the same steady demand for force from 
girls who are approaching puberty, ignoring 
Nature's periodical demands, that it does 
from boys, who are not called upon for an 
equal effort, there must be failure some- 
where. Generally either the reproductive 



98 BEX IN EDUCATION, 

system or the nervous system suffers. We 
have looked at several instances of the for- 
mer sort of failure ; let us now examine some 
of the latter. 

Miss F was about twenty years old 

when she completed her technical education. 
She inherited a nervous diathesis as well as a 
large dower of intellectual and aesthetic 
•graces. She was a good student, and con- 
scientiously devoted all her time, with the 
exception of ordinary vacations, to the labor 
of her education. She made herself mistress 
of several languages, and accomplished in 
many ways. The catamenial function ap- 
peared normally, and, with the exception of 
occasional slight attacks of menorrhagia, 
was normally performed during the whole 
period of her education. She got on without 
any sort of serious illness. There were few 
belonging to my clientele who required less 
professional advice for the same period than 
she. With the ending of her school life, 
when she should have been in good trim and 
well equipped, physically as well as Intel- 



CHIEFLY CLINICAL. 99 

lectually, for life's work, there commenced, 
without obvious cause, a long period of 
invalidism. It would be tedious to the 
reader, and useless for our present purpose, to 
detail the history and describe the protean 
shapes of her sufferings. With the excep- 
tion of small breasts, the reproductive system 
was well developed. Repeated and careful 
examinations failed to detect any derange- 
ment of the uterine mechanism. Her 
symptoms all pointed to ' the nervous system 
as the fons et origo mali. First general de- 
bility, that concealed but ubiquitous leader 
of innumerable armies of weakness and ill, 
laid siege to her, and captured her. Then 
came insomnia, that worried her nights for 
month after month, and made her beg for 
opium, alcohol, chloral, bromides, any thing 
that would bring sleep. Neuralgia in every 
conceivable form tormented her, most fre- 
quently in her back, but often, also, in her 
head, sometimes in her sciatic nerves, some- 
times setting up a tic douloureux, sometimes 
causing a fearful dysmenorrhoea and fre- 



100 SEX m EDUCATION. 

quently making her head ache for days 
together. At other times hysteria got hold 
of her, and made her fancy herself the victim 
of strange diseases. Mental effort of the 
slightest character distressed her, and she 
could not bear physical exercise of any 
amount. This condition, or rather these 
varying conditions, continued for some years. 
She followed a careful and systematic 
regimen, and was rewarded by a slow and 
gradual return of health and strength, when 
a sudden accident killed her, and terminated 
her struggle with weakness and pain. 

Words fail to convey the lesson of this 
case to others with any thing like the force 
that the observation of it conveyed its moral 

to those about Miss F , and especially to 

the physician who watched her career 
through her educational life, and saw it lead 
to its logical conclusion of invalidism and 
thence towardo recovery, till life ended. 
When she finished school, as the phrase goes, 
she was considered to be well. The principal 
of any seminary or head of any college, 



CHIEFLY CLINIC AU 101 

judging by her looks alone, would not have 
hesitated to call her rosy and strong. At 
that time the symptoms of failure which 
began to appear were called signs of previous 
overwork. This was true, but not so much 
in the sense of overwork as of erroneously- 
arranged work. While a student, she 
wrought continuously, — just as much during 
each catamenial week as at other times. As 
a consequence, in her metamorphosis of 
tissue, repair did little more than make up 
waste. There were constant demands of 
force for constant growth of the system 
generally, equally constant demands of 
force for the labor of education, and periodi- 
cal demands of force for a periodical func- 
tion. The regimen she followed did not 
permit all these demands to be satisfied, and 
the failure fell on the nervous system. She 
accomplished intellectually a good deal, but 
not more than she might have done, and re- 
tained her health, had the order of her edu- 
cation been a physiological one. It was not 
Latin, French, German, mathematics, or 



102 SEX IN EDUCATION, 

plailosopliy that undermined het nerves ; nor 
was it because of any natural inferiority to 
boys that she failed ; nor because she under- 
took to master what women have no right to 
learn : she lost her health simply because 
she undertook to do her work in a boy's way 
and not in a girl's way. 

Let us learn the lesson of one more case. 
These details may be tedious ; but the justi- 
fication of their presence here are the im- 
portance of the subject they illustrate and 
elucidate, and the necessity of acquiring a 
belief of the truth of the facts of female 
education. 

Miss G worked her way through New- 
England primary, grammar, and high schools 
to a Western college, which she entered with 
credit to herself, and from which she gradu- 
ated, confessedly its first scholar, leading the 
male and female youth alike. All that need 
be told of her career is that she worked as 
a student, continuously and perseveringly, 
through the years of her first critical epoch, 
and for a few years after it, without any 



CSIEFLY CLINICAL. 103 

sort of regard to the periodical type of her 
organization. It never appeared that she 
studied excessively in other respects, or that 
her system was weakened while in college 
by fevers or other sickness. Not a great 
while after graduation, she began to show 
signs of failure, and some years later died 
under the writer's care. A post-mortem ex- 
amination was made, which disclosed no dis- 
ease in any part of the body, except in the 
brain, where the microscope revealed com- 
mencing degeneration. 

This was called an instance of death from 
over-work. Like the preceding case, it was 
not so much the result of over-work as of 
Tin-physiological work. She was unable to 
make a good brain, that could stand the 
wear and tear of life, and a good reproduc- 
tive system that should serve the race, 
at the same time that she was continuously 
spending her force in intellectual labor. 
Nature asked for a periodical remission, 

and did not get it. And so Miss G 

died, not because she had mastered the 



104 SEX IN EDUCATIOIT. 

wasps of Aristophanes and the Mdchanique 
Celeste, not because she had made the 
acquaintance of Kant and KoUiker, and 
ventured to explore the anatomy of flowers 
and the secrets of chemistry, but because, 
while pursuing these studies, while doing all 
this work, she steadily ignored her woman's 
make. Believing that woman can do what 
man can, for she held that faith, she strove 
with noble but ignorant bravery to compass 
man's intellectual attainment in a man's way, 
and died in the effort. If she had aimed at 
the same goal, disregarding masculine and 
following feminine methods, she would be 
alive now, a grand example of female cul- 
ture, attainment, and power. 

These seven clinical observations are suffi- 
cient to illustrate the fact that our modern 
methods of education do not give the female 
organization a fair chance, but that they 
check development, and invite weakness. 
It would be easy to multiply such obser- 
vations, from the writer's own notes alone, 
and, by doing so, to swell this essay into a 



GEIEFLY CLINICAL, 105 

portly volume ; but the reader is spared the 
needless infliction. Other observers have 
noticed similar facts, and have urgently 
called attention to them. 

Dr. Fisher, in a recent excellent monograph 
on insanity, says, " A few examples of in- 
jury from continued study will show how 
mental strain affects the health of young girls 
particularly. Every physician could, no 
doubt, furnish many similar ones." 

" Miss A ^'^'"'^ '^raduated with honor at the 
normal school after several years of close 
study, much of the time out of school ; never 
attended balls or parties ; sank into a low 
state of health at once with depression. Was 
very absurdly allowed to marry while in this 
state, and soon after became violently insane, 
and is likely to remain so." 

" Miss A graduated at the grammar 

school, not only first, but perfect^ and at once 
entered the normal school ; was very am- 
bitious to sustain her reputation, and studied 
hard out of school ; was slow to learn, but 
had a retentive memory; could seldom be 



106 SEX IN EDUCATION, 

induced to go to parties, and, when she did 
go, studied while dressing, and on the way ; 
was assigned extra tasks at school, because 
she performed them so well; was a fine 
healthy girl in appearance^ but broke down 
permanently at end of second year, and is 
now a victim of hysteria and depression." 

" Miss C , of a nervous organization, 

and quick to learn; her health suffered in 
normal school, so that her physician predicted 
insanity if her studies were not discontinued. 
She persevered, however, and is now an in- 
mate of a hospital, with hysteria and de- 
pression." 

" A certain proportion of girls are predis- 
posed to mental or nervous derangement. 
The same girls are apt to be quick, brilliant, 
ambitious, and persistent at study, and need 
not stimulation, but repression. For the sake 
of a temporary reputation for scholarship, they 
risk their health at the most susceptible period 
of their lives, and break down after the ex- 
citement of school-life has passed away. For 
sexual reasons they cannot compete with boys, 



CHIEFLY CLINIQAL, 107 

whose out-door habits still further increase 
the difference in their favor. If it was a 
question of school-teachers instead of school- 
girls, the list would be long of young women 
whose health of mind has become bankrupt 
by a continuation of the mental strain com- 
menced at school. Any method of relief in 
our school-system to these over-susceptible 
minds should be welcomed, even at the cost 
of the intellectual supremacy of woman in 
the next generation." * 

The fact which Dr. Fisher alludes to, that 
many girls break down not during but after 
the excitement of school or college life, is an 
important one, and is apt to be overlooked. 
The process by whicli the development of the 
reproductive system is arrested, or degenera- 
tion of brain and nerve-tissue set a going, is 
an insidious one. At its beginning, and for a 
long time after it is well on in its progress, 
it would not be recognized by the superficial 
observer. A class of girls might, and often 

* Plain Talk about Insanity. By T. W. Eisher, M.D. 
Boston. Pp. 23, 24, 



108 SEX IN EDUCATION. 

do, graduate from our schools, higher semina- 
ries, and colleges, that appear to be well and 
strong at the time of their graduation, but 
whose development has already been checked, 
and whose health is on the verge of giving 
way. Their teachers have known nothing 
of the amenorrhoea, menorrhagia, dysmenor- 
rhcea, or leucorrhoea which the pupils have 
sedulously concealed and disregarded ; and the 
cunning devices of dress have covered up all 
external evidences of defect ; and so, on 
graduation day, they are pointed out by their 
instructors to admiring committees as rosy 
specimens of both physical and intellectual 
education. A closer inspection by. competent 
experts would reveal the secret weakness 
which the labor of life that they are about 
to enter upon too late discloses. 

The testimony of Dr. Anstie of London, as 
to the gravity of the evils incurred by the 
sort of erroneous education we are consider- 
ing, is decided and valuable. He says, " For, 
be it remembered, the epoch of sexual devel- 
opment is one in which an enormous addition 



CHIEFLY CLimCAL, 109 

is being made to the expenditure of vital en- 
ergy; besides the continuous processes of 
growth of the tissues and organs generally, 
the sexual apparatus, with its nervous supply, 
is making hy its development heavy demands 
upon the nutritive powers of the organism ; 
and it is scarcely possible but that portions of 
the nervous centres, not directly connected 
with it, should proportionally suffer in their 
nutrition, probably through defective blood 
supply. When we add to this the abnormal 
strain that is being put on the brain, in many 
cases, by a forcing plan of mental education, we 
shall perceive a soui'ce not merely of exhaust- 
ive expenditure of nervous power, but of sec- 
ondary irritation of centres like the medulla 
oblongata that are probably already somewhat 
lowered in power of vital resistance, and pro- 
portionably irritahleJ^ * A little farther on, 
Dr. Anstie adds, " But I confess, that, with 
me, the result of close attention given to the 
pathology of neuralgia has been the ever- 

* Neuralgia, and the Diseases that resemble it. By Fran- 
cis E. Anstie, M.D. Pp. 122. English ed. 



110 SEX IN EDUCATION. 

growing conviction, that, next to tlie influence 
of neurotic inheritance, there is no such fre- 
quently powerful factor in the construction 
of the neuralgic habit as mental warp of a cer- 
tain kind, the product of an unwise education." 
In another place, speaking of the liability of 
the brain to suffer from an unwise education, 
and referring to the sexual development that 
we are discussing in these pages, he makes the 
following statement, which no intelligent phy- 
sician will deny, and which it would be well 
for all teachers who care for the best educa- 
tion of the girls intrusted to their charge to 
ponder seriously. " I would also go farther, 
and express the opinion, that peripheral influ- 
ences of an extremely powerful and continuous 
kind, where they concur with one of those 
critical periods of life at which the central 
nervous system is relatively weak and unsta- 
ble, can occasionally set going a non-inflam- 
matory centric atrophy, which may localize 
itself in those nerves upon whose centres the 
morbific peripheral influence is perpetually 
pouring in. Even such influences as the psy- 



CHIEFLY CLINICAL, 111 

cliical and emotional, be it remembered, must 
be considered peripheral." * The brain of 

Miss G , whose case was related a few 

pages back, is a clinical illustration of the 
accuracy of this opinion. 

Dr. Weir Mitchell, one of our most eminent 
American physiologists, has recently borne 
most emphatic testimony to the evils we havQ 
pointed out : " Worst of all," he says, " to my 
mind, most destructive in every way, is the 
American view of female education. The 
time taken for the more serious instruction of 
girls extends to the age of eighteen, and 
rarely over this. During these years, they 
are undergoing such organic development as 
renders them remarkably sensitive." ... "To 
show more precisely how the growing girl is 
injured by the causes just mentioned " (forced 
and continued study at the sexual epoch) 
" would carry me upon subjects unfit for full 
discussion in these pages ; but no thoughtful 
reader can be much at a loss as to my mean- 
ing." ..." To-day the American woman is, 

* Op. cit., p. 160. 



112 SEX IN' EDUCATION. 

to speak plainly, physically unfit for her du- 
ties as woman, and is, perhaps, of all civilized 
females, the least qualified to undertake those 
weightier tasks which tax so heavily the ner- 
vous system of man. She is not fairly up to 
what Nature asks from her as wife and 
mother. How will she sustain herself under 
the pressure of those yet more exacting duties 
which now-a-days she is eager to share with 
the man ? " * 

In our schools it is the ambitious and con- 
scientious girls, those who have in them the 
stuff of which the noblest women are made, 
that suffer, not the romping or lazy sort ; and 
thus our modern ways of education provide 
for the " non-survival of the fittest." A 
speaker told an audience of women at Wes- 
leyan Hall not long ago, that he once attended 
the examination of a Western college, where 
a girl beat the boys in unravelling the intra- 
cacies of Juvenal. He did not report the 
consumption of blood and wear of brain tissue 
that in her college way of study correlated 

* Wear and Tear. By S. Weir MitcheU, M.D. 



CEIEFLY CLINICAL, 113 

her Latin, or hint at the possibility of arrested 
development. Girls of bloodless skins and 
intellectual faces may be seen any day, by 
those who desire the spectacle, among the 
scholars of our high and normal schools, — 
faces that crown, and skins that cover, curving 
spines, which should be straight, and neural- 
gic nerves that should know no pain. Later 
on, when marriage and maternity overtake 
these girls, and they " live laborious days " in a 
sense not intended by Milton's line, they bend 
and break beneath the labor, like loaded grain 
before a storm, and bear little fruit again. A 
training that yields this result is neither fair 
to the girls nor to the race. 

Let us quote the authority of such an acute 
and sagacious observer as Dr. Maudsley, in 
support of the physiological and pathological 
views that have been here presented. Refer- 
ring to the physiological condition and phe- 
nomena of the first critical epoch, he says, " In 
the great mental revolution caused by the 
development of the sexual system at puberty, 
we have the most striking example of the 

8 



114 SEX IN EDUCATION, 

intimate and essential sympathy between the 
brain, as a mental organ, and other organs of 
the body. The change of character at this 
period is not by any means limited to the 
appearance of the sexual feelings^ and their 
sympathetic ideas, but, when traced to its ulti- 
mate reach, will be found to extend to the 
highest feelings of mankind, social, moral, 
and even religious." * He points out the fact 
that it is very easy by improper training and 
forced work, during this susceptible period, 
to turn a physiological into a pathological 
state. " The great mental revolution which 
occurs at puberty may go beyond its physio- 
logical limits in some instances, and become 
^pathological." '•' The time of this mental 
revolution is at best a trying period for youth." 
" The monthly activity of the ovaries, which 
marks the advent of puberty in women, has a 
notable effect upon the mind and body ; 
wherefore it may become an important cause 
of mental and physical derangement." f 

* Body and Mind. By Henry Maudsley, M.D. Lond. p. 31. 
t Op. cit., p. 87. 



CHIEFLY CLINICAL. 115 

With regard to tlie physiological effects of 
arrested development of the reproductive 
apparatus in women, Dr. Maudsley uses 
the following plain and emphatic language : 
" The forms and habits of mutilated men 
approach those of women ; and women, whose 
ovaries and uterus remain for some cause in a 
state of complete inaction, approach the forms 
and habits of men. It is said, too, that, in 
hermaphrodites, the mental character, like the 
physical, participates equally in that of both 
sexes. While woman preserves her sex, she 
will necessarily be feebler than man, and, 
having her special bodily and mental charac- 
ters, will have, to a certain extent, her own 
sphere of activity ; where she has become 
thoroughly masculine in nature, or hermaphro- 
dite in mind, — when, in fact, she has pretty 
well divested herself of her sex, — then she 
may take his ground, and do his work ; but 
she will have lost her feminine attractions, and 
probably also her chief feminine functions." * 

* Op. cit., p. 32. 



116 SEX IN EDUCATION. 

It has been reserved for our age and country, 
by its methods of female education, to demon- 
strate that it is possible in some cases to di- 
vest a woman of her chief feminine functions ; 
in others, to produce grave and even fatal 
disease of the brain and nervous system ; in 
others, to engender torturing derangements 
and imperfections of the reproductive ap- 
paratus that imbitter a lifetime. Such, we 
know, is not the object of a liberal female edu- 
cation. Such is not the consummation which 
the progress of the age demands. Fortunately, 
it is only necessary to point out and prove 
the existence of such erroneous methods and 
evil results to have them avoided. That they 
can be avoided, and that woman can have a 
liberal education that shall develop all her 
powers, without mutilation or disease, up to 
the loftiest ideal of womanhood, is alike the 
teaching of physiology and the hope of the 
race. 

In concluding this part of our subject, it 
is well to remember the statement made at 
the beginning of our discussion, to the fol- 



CHIEFLY CLINICAL, 117 

lowing effect, viz., that it is not assexted 
here, that improper methods of study and a 
disregard of the reproductive apparatus and 
its functions, during the educational life of 
girls, are the sole causes of female diseases ; 
neither is it asserted that all the female grad- 
uates of our schools and colleges are patho- 
logical specimens. But it is asserted that the 
number of these graduates who have been 
permantly disabled to a greater or less degree, 
or fatally injured, by these causes, is such as to 
excite the gravest alarm, and to demand the 
serious attention of the community. 

The preceding physiological and pathologi- 
cal data naturally open the way to a consider- 
ation of the co-education of the sexes. 



PART IV. 

CO-EDUCATION. 

" Pistoc. Where, then, should I take my place ? 
1st Bacch. Near myself, that, with a she wit, a he wit may 
be reclining at our repast." — Bacchides op Plaftijs. 

" The woraan's-rights movement, with its conventions, its 
speech-makings, its crudities, and eccentricities, is neverthe- 
less a part of a healthful and necessary movement of the hu- 
man race towards progress." — Harriet Beecher -Stowe. 

Guided by the laws of development which 
we have found physiology to teach, and 
warned by the punishments, in the shape of 
weakness and disease, which we' have shown 
their infringement to bring about, and of 
which our present methods of female educa- 
tion furnish innumerable examples, it is not 
difficult to discern certain physiological prin- 
ciples that limit and control the education, 
and, consequently, the co-education of our 

118 



CO-EDUCATION. 119 

youth. These principles we have learned to be, 
three for the two sexes in common, and one 
for the peculiarities of the female sex. The 
three common to both, the three to which 
both are subjected, and for which wise meth- 
ods of education will provide in the case of 
both, are, 1st, a sufficient supply of appropriate 
nutriment. This of course includes good air 
and good water and sufficient warmth, as 
much as bread and butter ; oxygen and sun- 
light, as much as meat. 2d, Mental and phys- 
ical work and regimen so apportioned, that 
repair shall exceed waste, and a margin be 
left for development. This includes out- 
of-door exercise and appropriate ways of 
dressing, as much as the hours of study, 
and the number and sort of studies. 3d, 
Sufficient sleep. This includes the best 
time for sleeping, as well as the proper 
number of hours for sleep. It excludes the 
" murdering of sleep," by late hours of 
study and the crowding of studies, as much 
as by wine or tea or dissipation. All these 
guide and limit the education of the two 



120 SEX m EDUCATION, 

sexes very mucli alike. The principle or con- 
dition peculiar to the female sex is the man- 
agement of the catamenial function, which, 
from the age of fourteen to nineteen, includes 
the building of the reproductive apparatus. 
This imposes upon women, and especially 
upon the young woman, a great care, a corre- 
sponding duty, and compensating privileges. 
There is only a feeble counterpart to it in the 
male organization ; and, in his moral constitu- 
tion, there cannot be found the fine instincts 
and quick perceptions that have their root in 
this mechanism, and correlate its functions. 
This lends to her development and to all her 
work a rythmical or periodical order, which 
must be recognized and obeyed. " In this 
recognition of the chronometry of organic 
process, there is unquestionably greal^promise 
for the future ; for it is plain that the observ- 
ance of time in the motions of organic mole- 
cules is as certain and universal, if not as 
exact, as that of the heavenly bodies." * Pe- 
riodicity characterizes the female organization, 

* Body and Mind. Op. cit., p. 178. 



CO-EBUCATION. 121 

and developes feminine force. Persistence 
ch^acterizes the male organization, and de- 
velops mascnline force. Education will draw 
the best out of each by adjusting its methods 
to the periodicity of one and the persistence 
of the other. 

Before going farther, it is essential ix) ac- 
quire a definite notion of what is meant, or, 
at leasts of what we mean in this discussion, 
by the term co-education. Following its ety- 
mology, con-educare^ it signifies to draw out 
together, or to unite in education ; and this 
union refers to the time and place, rather than 
to the methods and kinds of education. In 
this sense any school or college may utilize 
its buildings, apparatus, and instructors to 
give appropriate education to the two sexes 
as well as to different ages of the same sex. 
This is juxtaposition in education. When the 
Massachusetts Institute of Technology teaches 
one class of young men chemistry, and an- 
other class engineering, in the same building 
and at the same time, it co-educates those two 
classes. In this sense it is possible that many 



122 SEX m EDUCATION. 

advantages might be obtained from the co- 
education of the sexes, that would more than 
counterbalance the evils of crowding large 
numbers of them together. This sort of co- 
education does not exclude appropriate clas- 
sification, nor compel the two sexes to follow 
the same methods or the same regimen. 

Another signification of co-education, and, 
as we apprehend, the one in which it is com- 
monly used, includes time, place, government, 
methods, studies, and regimen. This is iden- 
tical co-education. This means, that boys and 
girls shall be taught the same things, at the 
same time, in the same place, by the same 
faculty, with the same methods, and under 
the same regimen. This admits a^e and pro- 
ficiency, but not sex, as a factor in classifica- 
tion. It is against the co-education of the 
sexes, in this sense of identical co-education, 
that physiology protests ; and it is this identity 
of education, the prominent characteristic of 
our American school-system, that has pro- 
duced the evils described in the clinical part 
of this essay, and that threatens to push the 



CO-EDUCATION. ^ 123 

degeneration of the female sex still farther 
on. In these pages, co-education of the sexes 
is used in its common acceptation of identical 
co-education. 

Let us look for a moment at what identical 
co-education is. The law has, or had, a maxim, 
that a man and his wife are one, and that 
the one is the man. Modern American edu- 
cation has a maxim, that boys' schools and 
girls' schools are one, and that the one is the 
boys' school. Schools have been arranged, 
accordingly, to meet the requirements of the 
masculine organization. Studies have been 
selected that experience has proved to be 
appropriate to a boy's intellectual develop- 
ment, and a regimen adopted, while pursuing 
them, appropriate to his physical development. 
His school and college life, his methods of 
study, recitations, exercises, and recreations, 
are ordered upon the supposition, that, bar- 
ring disease or infirmity, punctual attend- 
ance upon the hours of recitation, and upon 
all other duties in their season and order, 
may be required of him continuously, in 



124 SEX m education: 

spite of ennui, inclement weather, or fa- 
tigue ; that there is no week in the month, 
or day in the week, or hour in the day, 
when it is a physical necessity to relieve 
him from standing or from studying, — from 
physical effort or mental labor ; that the 
chapel-bell may safely call him to morning 
prayer from I^ew Year to Christmas, with the 
assurance, that, if the going does not add to 
his stock of piety, it will not diminish his 
stock of health ; that he may be sent to the 
gymnasium and the examination-hall, to the 
theatres of physical and intellectual display at 
any time, — in short, that he develops health 
and strength, blood and nerve, intellect and 
life, by a regular, uninterrupted, and sustained 
course of work. And all this is justified both 
by experience and physiology. 

Obedient to the American educational 
maxim, that boys' schools and girls' schools 
are one, and that the one is the boys' school, 
the female schools have copied the methods 
which have grown out of the requirements of 
the male organization. Schools for girls have 



CO-EDUCATION, 125 

been modelled after schools for boys. Were 
it not for differences of dress and figure, it 
would be impossible, even for an expert, after 
visiting a high school for boys and one for 
girls, to tell which was arranged for the male 
and which for the female organization. Our 
girls' schools, whether public or private, have 
imposed upon their pupils a boy's regimen ; 
and it is now proposed, in some quarters, to 
carry this principle still farther, by burdening 
girls, after they leave school, with a quadren- 
nium of masculine college regimen. And so 
girls are to learn the alphabet in college, as 
they have learned it in the grammar-school, 
just as boys do. This is grounded upon the 
supposition that sustained regularity of action 
and attendance may be as safely required of 
a girl as of a boy ; that there is no physical 
necessity for periodically relieving her from 
walking, standing, reciting, or studying ; that 
the chapel-bell may call her, as well as him, to 
a daily morning walk, with a standing prayer 
at the end of it, regardless of the danger that 
such exercises, by deranging the tides of her 



126 SEX IN EDUCATION. 

organization, may add to her piety at the ex- 
pense of her blood ; that she may work her 
brain over mathematics, botany, chemistry, 
German, and the like, with equal and sus- 
tained force on every day of the month, and 
so safely divert blood from the reproductive 
apparatus to the head ; in short, that she, like 
her brother, develops health and strength, 
blood and nerve, intellect and life, by a reg- 
ular, uninterrupted, and sustained course of 
work. All this is not justified, either by ex- 
perience or physiology. The gardener may 
plant, if he choose, the lily and the rose, the 
oak and the vine, within the same enclosure ; 
let the same soil nourish them, the same air 
visit them, and the same sunshine warm and 
cheer them ; still, he trains each of them vidth 
a separate art, warding from each its peculiar 
dangers, developing within each its peculiar 
powers, and teaching each to put forth to the 
utmost its divine and peculiar gifts of strength 
and beauty. Girls lose health, strength, 
blood, and nerve, by a regimen that ignores 
the periodical tides and reproductive appa- 



CO-EDUCATION. 127 

ratus of their organization. Tlie mothers and 
instructors, the homes and schools, of our 
country's daughters, would profit by occasion- 
ally reading the old Levitieal law. The race 
has not yet quite outgrown the physiology of 
Moses, 

Co-education, then, signifies in common 
acceptation identical co-education. - This 
identity of training is what many at the pres- 
ent day seem to be praying for and working 
for. Appropriate education of the two sexes, 
carried as far as possible, is a consummation 
most devoutly to be desired ; identical edu- 
cation of the two sexes is a crime before 
God and humanity, that physiology protests 
against, and that experience weeps over. 
Because the education of boys has met with 
tolerable success, hitherto, — but only tolera- 
ble it must be confessed, — in developing them 
into men, there are thoso who would make 
girls grow into women by the same process. 
Because a gardener has nursed an acorn till it 
grew into an oak, they would 'have him cradle 
a grape in the same soil and way, and make 



128 SEX IN EDUCATION. 

it a vine. Identical education, oi identical 
co-education, of the sexes defrauds one sex 
or the other, or perhaps both. It defies the 
Roman maxim, which physiology has fully 
justified, mens sana in corpore sano. The 
sustained regimen, regular recitation, erect 
posture, daily walk, persistent exercise, and 
unintermitted labor that toughens a boy, and 
makes a man of him, can only be partially 
applied to a girl. The regimen of intermit- 
tance, periodicity of exercise and rest, work 
three-fourths of each month, and remission, 
if not abstinence, the other fourth, physio- 
logical interchange of the erect and reclining 
posture, care of the reproductive system that 
is the cradle of the race, all this, that tough- 
ens a girl and makes a woman of her, will 
emasculate a lad. A combination of the two 
methods of education, a compromise between 
them, would probably yield an average result, 
excluding the best of both. It would "give a 
fair chance neither to a boy nor a girl. Of all 
compromises, such a physiological one is the 
worst. It cultivates mediocrity, and cheats 



CO-EDUCATION. 129 

the future of its rightful legacy of lofty man- 
hood and womanhood. It emasculates boys, 
stunts girls ; makes semi-eunuchs of one sex, 
and agenes of the other. 

The error wliieh hus led to the identical 
education of the two sexes, and which proph- 
ecies their identical co-education in colleges 
and universities, is not confined to technical 
education. It permeates society. It is 
found in the home, the workshop, the 
factory, and in all the ramifications of social 
life. The identity of boys and girls, of men 
and women, is practically asserted out of the 
school as much as in it, and it is theoretically 
proclaimed from the pulpit and the rostrum. 
Woman seems to be looking up to man and 
his development, as the goal and ideal of wo- 
manhood. The new gospel of female devel- 
opment glorifies what she possesses in com- 
mon with him, and tramples under her feet, 
as a source of weakness and badge of inferi- 
ority, the mechanism and functions peculiar 
to herself. In consequence of this wide- 
spread error, largely the result of physio- 

9 



130 SEX IN EDUCATION. 

logical ignorance, girls are almost universally 
trained in m-asculine methods of living and 
working as well as of studying. The notion 
is practically found everywhere, that boys 
and girls are one, and that the boys make the 
one. Girls, young ladies, to use the polite 
phrase, who are about leaving or have left 
school for society, dissipation, or self-culture, 
rarely permit any of Nature's periodical de- 
mands to interfere with their morning calls, 
or evening promenades, or midnight dancing, 
or sober study. Even the home draws the 
sacred mantle of modesty so closely over 
the reproductive function as not only to 
cover but to smother it. Sisters imitate 
brothers in persistent work at all times. 
Female clerks in stores strive to emulate the 
males by unremitting labor, seeking to ^de- 
velop feminine force by masculine methods. 
Female operatives of all sorts, in factories 
and elsewhere, labor in the same way ; and, 
when the day is done, are as likely to dance 
half the night, regardless of any pressure 
upon them of a peculiar function, as their 



CO-EDUCATION, 131 

fashionable sisters in the polite world. All 
unite in pushing the hateful thing out of 
sight and out of mind ; and all are punished 
by similar weakness, degeneration, and 
disease. 

There are two reasons why female opera- 
tives of all sorts are likely to suffer less^ and 
actually do suffer less, from such persistent 
work, than female students ; why Jane in 
the factory can work more steadily with the 
loom, than Jane in college with the diction- 
ary ; why the girl who makes the bed can 
safely work more steadily the whole year 
through, than her little mistress of sixteen 
who goes to school. The first reason is, that 
the female operative, of whatever sort, has, 
as a rule, passed through the first critical 
epoch of woman's life : she has got fairly by 
it. In her case, as a rule, unfortunately 
there are too many exceptions to it, the cata- 
menia have been established; the function 
is in good running order ; the reproduc- 
tive apparatus — the engine within an en- 
gine — has been constructed, and she will 



•«* 



132 SEX IN education: 

not be called upon to furnish force for build- 
ing it again. The female student, "on the 
contrary, has got these tasks before her, and 
must perform them while getting her educa- 
tion ; for the period of female sexual devel- 
opment coincides with the educational period. 
The same five years of life must be given to 
both tasks. After the function is normally 
established, and the apparatus made, woman 
can labor mentally or physically, or both, 
with very much greater persistence and 
intensity, than during the age of develop- 
ment. She still retains the type of period- 
icity ; and her best work, both as to quality 
and amount, is accomplished when the order 
of her labor partakes of the rhythmic order 
of her constitution. Still the fact remains, 
that she can do more than before ; her fibre 
has acquired toughness ; the system is con- 
solidated ; its fountains are less easily stirred. 
It should be mentioned in this connection, 
what has been previously adverted to, that 
the toughness and power of after life are 
largely in proportion to the normality of sex- 



CO-EDUGATION. 133 

ual development. If there is error then, the 
organization never fully recovers. This is an 
additional motive for a strict physiological 
regimen during a girl's student life, and, just 
so far, an argument against the identical co- 
education of the sexes. The second reason 
why female operatives are less likely to suffer, 
and actually do suffer less, than school-girls, 
from persistent work straight through the 
year, is because the former work their brains 
less. To use the language of Herbert Spen- 
cer, " That antagonism between body and 
brain which we see in those, who, pushing 
brain-activity to an extreme, enfeeble their 
bodies," * does not often exist in female 
operatives, any more than in male. On the 
contrary, they belong to the class of those 
who, in the words of the same author, by 
" pushing bodily activity to an extreme, 
make their brains inert." * Hence they have 
stronger bodies, a reproductive apparatus 
more normally constructed, and a catamenial 
function less, readily disturbed by effort, than 

* The Study of Sociology, by Herbert Spencer^ chap. 13. 



134 8EX IN EDUCATION 

their student sisters, who are not only younger 
than they, but are trained to push " brain- 
activity to an extreme." Give girls a fair 
chance for physical development at school, 
and they will be able in after life, with rea- 
sonable care of themselves, to answer the 
demands that may be made upon them. 

The identical education of the sexes has 
borne the fruit which we have pointed out. 
Their identical co-education will intensify the 
evils of separate identical education; for it 
will introduce the element of emulation, and 
it will introduce this element in its strongest 
form. It is easy to frame a theoretical emu- 
lation, in which results only are compared 
and tested, that would be healthy and invig- 
orating ; but such theoretical competition 
of the sexes is not at all the ^rt of steady, 
untiring, day-after-day competition that iden- 
tical co-education implies. It is one thing to 
put up a goal a long way off, — ^Ye or six 
months or three or four years distant, — and 
tell boys and girls, each in their own way, 
to strive for it, and quite a djjfferent thing to 



CO-EDUCATION, 135 

put up the same goal, at the same distance, 
and oblige each sex to run their race for it 
side by side on the same road, in daily com- 
petition with each other, and with equal 
expenditure of force at all times. Identical 
co-education is racing in the latter way. The 
inevitable results of it have been shown in 
some of the cases we have narrated. The 
trial of it on a larger scale would only yield 
a larger number of similar degenerations, 
weaknesses, and sacrifices of noble lives. 
Put a boy and girl together upon the same 
course of study, with the same lofty ideal 
before them, and hold up to their eyes the 
daily incitements of comparative progress, 
and there will be awakened within them a 
stimulus unknown before, and that separate 
study does not excite. The unconscious fires 
that have their seat deep down in the recesses 
of the sexual organization will flame up 
through every tissue, permeate every vessel, 
burn every nerve, flash from the eye, tingle 
in the brain, and work the whole machine at 
highest pressure. There need not be, and 



136 SEX ZZV EDUCATION. 

generally will not be, any low or sensual 
desire in all this elemental action. It is only 
making youth work over the tasks of sober 
study with the wasting force of intense pas- 
sion. Of course such strenuous labor will 
yield brilliant, though temporary, results. 
The fire is kept alive by the waste of the 
system, and soon burns up its source. The 
first sex to suffer in this exhilarating and 
costly competition must be, as experience 
shows it is, the one that has the largest 
amount of force in readiness for immediate 
call ; and this is the female sex. At the age 
of development, Nature mobilizes the forces 
of a girl's organization for the purpose of 
establishing a function that shall endure for 
a generation, and for constructing an appara- 
tus that shall cradle and nurse a race. These 
mobilized forces, which, at the technical 
educational period, the girl possesses and 
controls largely in excess of the boy, under 
the passionate stimulus of identical co-edu- 
cation, are turned from their divinely-ap- 
pointed field of operations, to the region of 



CO-EDUCATION. 137 

brain activity. The result is a most brilliant 
sbow of cerebral pyrotechnics, and degenera- 
tions that we have described. 

That undue and disproportionate brain 
activity exerts a sterilizing influence upon 
both sexes is alike a doctrine of physiology, 
and an induction from experience. And 
both physiology and experience also teach 
that this influence is more potent upon the 
female than upon the male. The explanation 
of the latter fact — of the greater aptitude 
of the female organization to become thus 
modified by excessive brain activity — is 
probably to be found in the larger size, more 
complicated relations, and more important 
functions, of the female reproductive appara- 
tus. This delicate and complex mechanism 
is liable to be aborted or deranged by the 
withdrawal of force that is needed for its 

ft 

construction and maintenance. It is, per- 
haps, idle to speculate upon the prospective 
evil that would accrue to the human race, 
should such an organic modification, intro- 
duced by abnormal education, be pushed to 



138 SEX IN EDUCATION, 

its ultimate limit. But inasmuch as the 
subject is not only germain to our inquiry, 
but has attracted the attention of a recent 
writer, whose bold and philosophic specula- 
tions, clothed in forcible language, have 
startled the best thought of the age, it may 
be well to quote him briefly on this point. 
Referring to the fact, that, in our modern civ- 
ilization, the cultivated classes have smaller 
families than the uncultivated ones, he says, 
" If the superior sections and specimens of 
humanity are to lose, relatively, their procre- 
ative power in virtue of, and in proportion to, 
that superiority, how is culture or progress to 
be propagated so as to benefit the species as 
a whole, and how are those gradually 
amended organizations from which we hopie 
so much to be secured ? If, indeed, it were 
ignorance, stupiditj^, and destitution, instead 
of mental and moral development, that were 
the sterilizing influences, then the improve- 
ment of the race would go on swimmingly, 
and in an ever-accelerating ratio. But since 
the conditions are exactly reversed, how 



co-education; 139 

should not an exactly opposite direction be 
pursued ? How should the race not deterio- 
rate, when those who morally and physically 
are fitted to perpetuate it are (relatively), 
by a law of physiology, those least likely to 
do so ? " * The answer to Mr. Greg's inquiry 
is obvious. If the culture of the race moves 
on into the future in the same rut and by the 
same methods that limit and direct it now ; if 
the education of the sexes remains identical, 
instead of being appropriate and special ; and 
especially if the intense and passionate stimu- 
lus of the identical co-education of the sexes 
is added to their identical education, — then the 
sterilizing influence of such a training, acting 
with tenfold more force upon the female 
than upon the male, will go on, and the race 
will be propagated from its inferior classes. f 

* Enigmas of Life. Op. cit., bj W. E. Greg, p. 142. 

t It is a fact not to be lost sight of, says Dr. J. C. Toner 
of Washington, that the proportion between the number of 
American children under fifteen years of age, and the number 
of American women between the child-bearing ages of fifteen 
and fifty, is declining steadily. In 1 830, there were to every 
1,000 marriageable women, 1,952 children under fifteen years 



140 SEX m EDUCATIOIT. 

The stream of life that is to flow into the 
future will be Celtic rather than American : 
it will come from the collieries, and not from 
the peerage. Fortunately, the reverse of tliis 
picture is equally possible. The race holds 
its destinies in its own hands. The highest 
wisdom will secure the survival and propaga- 
tion of the fittest. Physiology teaches that 
this result, the attainment of which our hopes 
prophecy, is to be secured, not by an identi- 
cal education, or an identical co-education of 
the sexes, but by a special and ajjpropriate 
education^ that shall produce a just and harmo- 
nious development of every part. 

Let one remark be made here. It has been 
asserted that the chief reason why the higher 

of age. Ten years later, there were 1,863, or 89 less children 
to every thousand women than in 1830. In 1850, this num- 
ber had declined to 1,720 ; in 1860, to 1,666 ; and in 187,0, to 
1,568. The total decline in the forty years was 384, or about 
20 per cent of the whole proportional number in 1830, a gen- 
eration ago. The United-States census of 1870 shows that 
there is, in the city of New York, but one child under fifteen 
years of age, to each thousand nubile women, when there 
ought to be three ; and the same is true of our other large 
cities. — The. Nation, Aug. 28, 1873, p. 145. 



CO'ED UCA TION. 141 

and educated classes have smaller families 
tlian the lower and uneduK3ated is, that the 
former criminally prevent or destroy increase. 
The pulpit,* as well as the medical press, has 
cried out against this enormity. That a dis- 
position to do this thing exists, and is often 
carried into effect, is not to be denied, and 
cannot be too strongly condemned. On the 
other hand, it should be proclaimed, to the 
credit and honor of our cultiv^ed women, 
and as a reproach to the identical education 
of the sexes, that many of them bear in 
silence the accusation of self-tampering, -^ho 
are denied the oft-prayed-for trial, blessing, 
and responsibility of offspring. As a matter 
of personal experience, my advice has been 
much more frequently and earnestly sought 
by those of our best classes who desired -to 
know how to obtain, than by those who 
wished to escape, the offices of maternity. 

The experiment of the identical co-educa- 
tion of the sexes has been set on foot by some 
of our Western colleges. It has not yet 

* Vid. a pamphlet by the Rev. Dr. Todd. 



142 SEX IN EDUCATION. 

been tried long enough to show much more 
than its first fruits, viz., its results while the 
students are in college ; and of these the only 
obvious ones are increased emulation, and 
intellectual development and attainments. 
The defects of the reproductive mechanism, 
and the friction of its action, are not ex- 
hibited there ; nor is there time or opportu- 
nity in college for the evils which these 
d.efects entail to be exhibited. President 
Magoun of Iowa College tells us, that, in the 
institution over which he presides, " Forty- 
two young men and fifty-three young ladies 
have pursued college courses ; " and adds, 
" Nothing needs to be said as to the control 
of the two sexes in the college. The young 
ladies are placed under the supervision of a 
lady principal and assistant as to deportment, 
and every thing besides recitations (in which 
they are under the supervision of the same 
professors and other teachers with the young 
men, reciting with them) ; and one simple 
rule as to social intercourse governs every 
thing. The moral and religious influences 



CO-EDUCATION, 143 

attending the arrangement have been most 
happy." * From this it is evident that Iowa 
College is trying the identical co-education of 
the sexes ; and the president reports the happy 
moral and religious results of the experiment, 
but leaves us ignorant of its physiological 
results. It may never have occurred to him, 
that a class of a hundred young ladies might 
graduate from Iowa College or Antioch Col- 
lege or Michigan University, whose average 
health during their college course had ap- 
peared to the president and faculty as good 
as that of their male classmates who had 
made equal intellectual progress with them, 
upon whom no scandal had dropped its ven- 
om, who might be presented to the public on 
Commencement Day as specimens of as good 
health as their uneducated sisters, with roses 
in their cheeks as natural as those in their 
hands, the major part of whom might, not- 
withstanding all this, have physical defects 
that a physiologist could easily discover, and 

* The New Englander, July, 1873. Art., Iowa College. 



144 SEX IN EDUCATION. 

that would produce, sooner or later, more or 
less of the sad results we have previously 
described. A philanthropist and an intelli- 
gent observer, who has for a long time taken 
an active part in promoting the best educa- 
tion of the sexes, a*nd who still holds some 
sort of official connection with a Gpllege 
occupied with identical co-education, told the 
writer a few months ago, that he had endeav- 
ored to trace the post-college history of the 
female graduates of the institution he was 
interested in. His object was to ascertain 
how their physique behaved under the stress, 
— the wear and tear of woman's work in 
life. The conclusion that resulted from his 
inquiry he formulated in the statement, that 
"the co-education of the sexes is intellectually 
a success, physically a failure." Another 
gentleman, more closely connected with a 
similar institution of education than the per- 
son just referred to, has arrived at a similar 
conclusion. Only a few female graduates 
of colleges have consulted the writer profes- 
sionally. All sought his advice two, three, or 



CO-EDUCATION. 145 

more years after graduation ; and, in all, the 
difficulties under which they labored could be 
distinctly traced to their college order of life 
and study, that is, to identical co-education. 
If physicians who are living in the neighbor- 
hood of the present residences of these 
graduates have been consulted by them in 
the same proportion with him, the infer- 
ence is inevitable, that the ratio of inval- 
idism among female college graduates is 
greater than even among the graduates of 
our common, high, and normal schools. All 
such observations as these, however, are only 
of value, ^ at present, as indications of the 
drift of identical co-education, not as proofs 
of its physical fruits, or of their influence on 
mental force. Two or three generations, at 
least, of the female college graduates of this 
sort of co-education must come and go 
before any sufficient idea can be formed of 
the harvest it will yield. The physiologist 
dreads to see the costly experiment tried. 
The urgent reformer, who cares less for 
human suffering and human life than for the 

10 



146 8EX IN EDUCATION. 

trial of his theories, will regard the experi- 
ment with equanimity if not with com- 
placency. 

If, then, the identical co-education of the 
sexes is condemned both by physiology and 
experience, may it not be that their special 
and appropriate co-education would yield a 
better result than their special and appropri- 
ate separate education ? This is a most im- 
portant question, and one difficult to resolve. 
The discussion of it must be referred to those 
who are engaged in the practical work of 
instruction, and the decision will rest with 
experienge. Physiology advocates, as we 
have seen, the special and appropriate edu- 
cation of the sexes, and has only a single 
word to utter with regard to simple co-edu- 
cation, or juxtaposition in education. 

That word is with regard to the common 
belief in the danger of improprieties and 
scandal as a part of co-education. There is 
some danger in this respect ; but not a serious 
or unavoidable one. Doubtless there would 
be occasional lapses in a double-sexed college 5 



CO-EDUCATION, 147 

and so there are outside of schoolhouses and 
seminaries of learning. Even the church and 
the clergy are not exempt from reproach in 
such things. There are sects, professing to 
commingle religion and love, who illustrate 
the dangers of juxtaposition even in things 
holy. " No physiologist can well doubt that 
the holy kiss of love in such cases owes aU 
its warmth to the sexual feeling which con- 
sciously or unconsciously inspires it, or that 
the mystical union of the sexes lies very close 
to a union that is nowise mystical, when it 
does not lead to madness." * There is less, 
or certainly no more danger in having the 
sexes unite at the repasts of knowledge, than, 
as Plautus bluntly puts it, having he wits and 
she wits recline at the repasts of fashion. Iso- 
lation is more likely to breed pruriency than 
commingling to provoke indulgence. The 
virtue of the cloister and the cell scarcely de- 
serves the name. A girl has her honor in her 
own keeping. If she can be trusted with 

* Body and Mind. Op. cit., p. 85. 



> 



148 SEX IN EDUCATION. 

boys and men at the lecture-room and in 
church, she can be trusted with them at school 
and in college. Jean Paul says, " To insure 
modesty, I would advise the education of the 
sexes together; for two boys will preserve 
twelve girls, or two girls twelve boys, innocent 
amidst winks, jokes, and improprieties, merely 
by that instinctive sense which is the fore- 
runner of matured modesty. But I will guar- 
antee nothing in a school where girls are alone 
together, and still less when boys are." A 
certain amount of juxta-position is an advan- 
tage to each sex. More than a certain amount 
is an evil to both. Instinct and common sense 
can be safely left to draw the line of demar- 
cation. At the same time it is well to re- 
member, that, though a bath is a health-giving 
process to all, it does not follow that the two 
sexes should bathe at the same time and in 
the same tub. 

There are two considerations appertaining 
to this subject, which, although they do not 
belong to the physiology of the matter, de- 
serve to be mentioned in this connection. 



CO-EDUCATION. 149 

One amounts to a practical proliibition, for 
the present at least, of the experiment of the 
special and appropriate co-education of the 
sexes ; and the other is an inherent difficulty 
in the experiment itself. The former can be 
removed whenever those who heartily believe 
in the success of the experiment choose to get 
rid of it ; and the latter by patient and intel- 
ligent effort. 

The present practical prohibition of the ex- 
periment is the poverty of our colleges. Iden- 
tical co-education can be easily tried with the 
existing organization of collegiate instruction. 
This has been tried, and is still going on in 
separate and double-sexed schools of all sorts, 
and has failed. Special and appropriate co- 
education requires in many ways, not in all, 
re-arrangement of the organization of instruc- 
tion ; and this will cost money and a good deal 
of it. Harvard College, for example, rich as 
it is supposed to be, whose banner, to use Mr. 
Higginson's illustration, is the red flag that 
the bulls of female reform are just now pitch- 
ing into, — Harvard College could not under- 



150 SEX IN EDUCATION'. 

take the task of special and appropriate co- 
education, in such a way as to give the two 
sexes a fair chance, which means the best 
chance, and the only chance it ought to give 
or will ever give, without an endowment, ad- 
ditional to its present resources, of from one 
to two millions of dollars; and it probably 
would require the larger rather than the 
smaller sum. And this I say advisedly. By 
which I mean, not with the advice and con- 
sent of the president and fellows of the col- 
lege, but as an opinion founded on nearly 
twenty years' personal acquaintance, as an 
instructor in one of the departments of the 
university, with the organization of instruc- 
tion in it, and upon the demands which physi- 
ology teaches the special and appropriate 
education of girls would make upon it. To 
make boys half-girls, and girls half-boys, can 
never be the legitimate function of any col- 
lege. But such a result, the natural child of 
identical co-education, is sure to follow the 
training of a college that has not the pecuni- 
ary means to prevent it. This obstacle is of 



CO-ED UCA TION, 151 

course a removable one. It is only necessary 
for those who wish to get it out of the way 
to put their hands in their pockets, and pro- 
duce a couple of millions. The offer of such 
a sum, conditioned upon the liberal education 
of women, might influence even a body as 
soulless as the corporation of Harvard College 
is sometimes represented to be. 

The inherent difficulty in the experiment 
of special and appropriate co-education is the 
difficulty of adjusting, in the same institu- 
tion, the methods of instruction to the physi- 
ological needs of each sex ; to the persistent 
type of one, and the periodical type of the 
other ; to the demand for a margin in met- 
amorphosis of tissue, beyond what study 
causes, for general growth in one sex, and 
for a larger margin in the other sex, that 
shall permit not only general growth, but 
also the construction of the reproductive 
apparatus. This difficulty can only be re- 
moved by patient and intelligent effort. 
The first step in the direction of removing it 
is to see plainly what errors or dangers lie in 



152 SEX IN EDUCATION. 

the way. Tliese, or some of tliem, we have 
endeavored to point out. "Nothing is so 
conducive to a right appreciation of the 
truth as a right appreciation of the error by 
which it is surrounded." * When we have 
acquired a beHef of the facts concerning the 
identical education, the identical co-educa- 
tion, the appropriate education, and the appro- 
priate co-education of the sexes, we shall be 
in a condition to draw just conclusions from 
them. 

The intimate connection of mind and 
brain, the correlation of mental power and 
cerebral metamorphosis, explains and justi- 
fies the physiologist's demand, that in the 
education of girls, as well as of boys, the 
machinery and methods of instruction shall 
be carefully adjusted to their organization. 
If it were possible, they should be adjusted 
to the organization of each individual. None 
doubt the importance of age, acquirement, 



* Use of the Ophthalmoscope. By T. C. Allbatt. Lon- 
don. P. 5. 



co-education: 153 

idiosyncrasy, and probable career in life, as 
factors in classification. Sex goes deeper 
than any or all of these. To neglect this is 
to neglect the chief factor of the problem. 
Rightly interpreted and followed, it will 
yield the grandest results. Disregarded, it 
will balk the best methods of teaching and 
the genius of the best teachers. Sex is not 
concerned with studies as such. These, for 
any thing that appears to the contrary physi- 
ologically, may be the same for the intellec- 
tual development of females as of males; 
but, as we have seen, it is largely concerned 
about an appropriate way of pursuing them. . 
Girls will have a fair chance, and women the 
largest freedom and greatest power, now that 
legal hinderances are removed, and all bars let 
down, when they are taught to develop and 
are willing to respect their own organiza- 
tion. How to bring about this development 
and insure this respect, in a double-sexed 
college, is one of the problems of co-educa- 
tion. 

It does not come within the scope of this 



154 SEX IN EDUCATION. 

essay to speculate upon tlie ways — the regi- 
men, methods of instruction, and other de- 
tails of college life, — by which the inherent 
difficulties of co-education may be obviated. 
Here tentative and judicious experiment is 
better than speculation. It would seem to 
be the part of wisdom, however, to make the 
simplest and least costly experiment first; 
that is, to discard the identical separate edu- 
cation of girls as boys, and to ascertain what 
their appropriate separate education is, and 
what it will accomplish. Aided by the light 
of such an experiment, it would be compara- 
tively easy to solve the more difficult prob- 
lem of the appropriate co-education of the 
sexes. 

It may be well to mention two or three 
details, v/hich are so important that no sys- 
tem of appropriate female education, separate 
or mixed, can neglect them. They have 
been implied throughout the whole of the 
present discussion, but not distinctly enun- 
ciated. One is, that during the period of 
rapid development, that is, from fourteen 



CO-EDUCATION, 155 

to eighteen,* a girl should not study as 
many hours a day as a boy. " In most of 
our schools," says a distinguished physiologi- 
cal authority previously quoted, " the hours 
are too many for both boys and girls. From 
a quarter of nine or nine, until half-past two, 
is with us (Philadelphia schools for girls) 
the common school time in private semina- 
ries. The usual recess is twenty minutes or 
half an hour, and it is not filled by enforced 
exercise. In certain schools, — would it were 
the rule, — ten minutes' recess is given after 
every hour. To these hours, we must add 
the time spent in study out of school. This, 
for some reason, nearly always exceeds the 
time stated by teachers to be necessary ; and 
most girls between the age of thirteen and 
seventeen thus expend two or three hours. 

* Some physiologists consider that the period of growth 
extends to a later age than this. Dr. Anstie fixes the limit 
at twenty-five. He says, " The central nervous system is 
more slow in reaching its fullest development ; and the brain, 
especially, is many years later in acquiring its maximum of 
organic consistency and functional power." — Neuralgia, Op. 
cit., by F. E. Anstie, p. 20. 



156 SEX /xV EDUCATIOJSf. 

Does any physician believe that it is good for 
a growing girl to be so occupied seven or 
eight hours a day ? or that it is right for her 
to use her brains as long a time as the me- 
chanic employs his muscles ? But this is only 
a part of the evil. The multiplicity of stud- 
ies, the number of teachers, — each eager to 
get the most he can out of his pupil, — the 
severer drill of our day, and the greater in- 
tensity of application demanded, produce 
effects on the growing brain, which, in a vast 
number of cases, can be only disastrous. 
Even in girls of from fourteen to eighteen, 
such as crowd the normal school in Phila- 
delphia, this sort of tension and this variety 
of study occasion an amount of ill-health 
which is sadly familiar to many physi- 
cians." * 

Experience teaches that a healthy and 
growing boy may spend six hours of force 
daily upon his studies, and leave sufficient 
margin for physical growth. A girl cannot 
spend more than four, or, in occasional in- 

* Wear aud Tear. Op. cit., p. 33-4. 



CO-EDUCATION. 157 

stances, five hours of force daily upon her 
studies, and leave sufficient margin for the 
general physical growth that she must make in 
common with a boy, and also for constructing 
a reproductive apparatus. If she puts as 
much force into her brain education as a boy, 
the brain or the special apparatus will suffer. 
Appropriate education and appropriate co- 
education must adjust their methods and 
regimen to this law. 

Another detail is, that, during every fourth 
week, there should be a remission, and some- 
times an intermission, of both study and 
exercise. Some individuals require, at that 
time, a complete intermission from mental 
and physical effort for a single day ; others 
for two or three days ; others require only a 
remission, and can do half work safely for 
two or three days, and their usual work after 
that. The diminished labor, which shall 
give Nature an opportunity to accomplish her 
special periodical task and growth, is a phys- 
iological necessity for all, however robust 
they may seem to be. The apportionment 



158 SEX liY EDUCATION-, 

of study and exercise to individual needs 
cannot be decided by general rules, nor can 
the decision of it be safely left to the pupil's 
caprice or ambition. Each case must be 
decided upon its own merits. The organiza- 
tion of studies and instruction must be flexi- 
ble enough to admit of the periodical and 
temporary absence of each pupil, without 
loss of rank, or necessity of making up work, 
from recitation, and exercise of all sorts. The 
periodical type of woman's way of work 
must be harmonized with the persistent type 
of man's way of work in any successful plan 
of co-education. 

The keen eye and rapid hand of gain, of 
what Jouffroy calls self-interest well under- 
stood, is sometimes quicker than the brain 
and will of philanthropy to discern and in- 
augurate reform. An illustration of this 
statement, and a practical recognition of the 
physiological method of woman's work, lately 
came under my observation. There is an es- 
tablishment in Boston, owned and carried on 
by a man, in which ten or a dozen girls are 



CO-EDUCATION, 159 

constantly employed. Each of them is given 
and required to take a vacation of three days 
every fourth week. It is scarcely necessary 
to say that their sanitary condition is excep- 
tionally good, and that the aggregate yearly 
amount of work which the owner obtains is 
greater than when persistent attendance and 
labor was required. I have never heard of 
any female school, public or private, in which 
any such plan has been adopted ; nor is it 
likely that any similar plan will be adopted 
so long as the community entertain the con- 
viction that a boy's education and a girl's 
education should be the same, and that the 
same means the boy's. What is known in 
England as the Ten-hour Act, which Mr. 
Mundella and Sir John Lubbock have recently 
carried through Parliament, is a step in a 
similar direction. It is an act providing for 
the special protection of women against 
over-work. It does not recognize, and prob- 
ably was not intended to recognize, the 
periodical type of woman's organization. It 
is founded on the fact, however, which law 



160 SEX IN EDUCATION. 

has been so slow to acknowledge, that the 
male and female organization are not identi- 
cal.* 

This is not the place for the discussion of 
these details, and therefore we will not dwell 
upon them. Our object is rather to show 

* It is a curious commentarj on the present aspect of the 
" woman question " to see many who honestly advocate the 
elevation and enfranchisement of woman, oppose any move- 
ment or law that recognizes Nature's fundamental distinc- 
tion of sex. There are those who insist upon the traditional 
fallacy that man and woman are identical, and that the iden- 
tity is confined to the man, with the energy of infatuation. 
It appears from the Spectator, that Mr. and Mrs. Fawcett 
strongly object to the Ten-hour Act, on the ground that it 
discriminates unfairly against women as compared with 
men. Upon this the Spectator justly remarks, that the true 
question for an objector to the bill to consider is not one of 
abstract principle, but this : " Is the restraint proposed so 
great as really to diminish the average productiveness of 
woman's labor, or, by increasing its efficacy, to maintain its 
level, or even improve it in spite of the hours lost ? What is 
the length of labor beyond which an average woman's con- 
stitution is overtaxed and deteriorated, and within which, 
therefore, the law ought to keep them in spite of their rela- 
tions, and sometimes in spite of themselves." — Vid. Specta- 
tor, London, June 14, 1873. 



co-education: 161 

good and imperative reason why they should 
be discussed by others ; to show how faulty 
and pregnant of ill the education of Ameri- 
can girls has been and is, and to demonstrate 
the truth, that the progress and development 
of the race depend upon the appropriate, and 
not upon the identical education of the 
sexes. Little good will be done in this di- 
rection, however, by any advice or argument, / 
by whatever facts supported, or by whatever 
authority presented, unless the women of our 
country are themselves convinced of the 
evils that they have been educated into, and 
out of which they are determined to educate 
their daughters. They must breed in them 
the lofty spirit Wallenstein bade his be of : — 

" Leave now the puny wish, the girlish feeling, 
Oh, thrust it far behind thee ! Give thou proof 
Thou'rt the daughter of the Mighty, — his 
"Who where he moves creates the wonderful. 
Meet and disarm necessity by choice." 
Schiller : The Piccolomini, act iii. 8. ( Coleridge's Trans- 
lation.) 

11 



PART V. 

THE EUROPEAN WAY. 

" And let it appear that he doth not change his country 
manners for those of foreign parts, but only prick in some 
flowers of that he hath learned abroad into the customs of 
his own country." — Lord Bacon. 

Ojste branch of the stream of travel that 
flows with steadily-increasing volume across 
the Atlantic, fi'om the western to the eastern 
continent, passes from the United States, 
through Nova Scotia, to England. The trav- 
eller who follows this route is struck, almost 
as soon as he leaves the boundaries of the re- 
pubhc, with the difference between the phy- 
sique of the inhabitants he encounters and 
that of those he has left behind him. The 
difference is most marked between the 
females of the two sections. The firmer 

162 



TEE EUROPEAN WAY. 163 

step, fuller chest, and ruddier cheek of the 
Nova-Scotian girl foretell still greater dif- 
ferences of color, form, and strength that 
England and the Continent present. These 
differences impressed one who passed through 
Nova Scotia not long ago very strongly. 
Her observations upon them are an excellent 
illustration of our subject, and they deserve 
to be read in this connection. Her remarks, 
moreover, are indirect but valuable testimony 
to the evils of our sort of identical education 
of the sexes. " Nova Scotia," she says, " is a 
country of gracious surprises." 

" But most beautiful among her beauties, 
most wonderful among her wonders, are her 
children. Daring two weeks' travel in the 
Provinces, I have been constantly more and 
more impressed by their superiority in ap- 
pearance, size, and health, to the children of 
the New-England and Middle States. In the 
outset of our journey, I was struck by it ; 
along all the roadsides they looked up, boys 
and girls, fair, broad-cheeked, sturdy-legged, 
such as with us are seen only now and then. 



164 SEX IN EDUCATION. 

I did not, however, realize at first that this 
was the universal law of the land, and that it 
pointed to something more than climate as a 
cause. Bat the first school that I saw, en 
masse^ gave a startling impetus to the train 
of observation and influence into which I was 
unconsciously falling. It was a Sunday 
school in the little town of Wolfville, which 
lies between the Gaspereau and Cornwallis 
Rivers, just beyond the meadows of the Grand 
Pre, where lived Gabriel Lajeunesse, and 
Benedict Bellefontaine, and the rest of the 
' simple Acadian farmers.' I arrived too early 
at one of the village churches ; and, while I 
.was waiting for a sexton, a door opened, and 
out poured the Sanday school, whose services 
had just ended. On they came, dividing in 
the centre, and falling to the right and left 
about me, thirty or forty boys and girls, be- 
tween the ages of seven and fifteen. They 
all had fair skins, red cheeks, and clear eyes ; 
they were all broad-shouldered, straight, and 
sturdy ; the younger ones were more than 
sturdy, — they were fat, from the ankles up. 



THE EUROPEAN WAY. 165 

But perhaps the most noticeable thing of all 
was the quiet, sturdy, unharassed expression 
which their faces wore ; a look which is the 
greatest charm of a child's face, but which 
we rarely see in children over two or three 
years old. Boys of eleven or twelve were 
there, with shoulders broader than the average 
of our boys at sixteen, and yet with the pure 
childlike look on their faces. Girls of ten or 
eleven were there, who looked almost like 
women, — that is, like ideal women, — simply 
because they looked so calm and undisturbed. 
. . . Out of them all there was but one child 
who looked sickly. He had evidently met 
with some accident, and was lame. Afterward, 
as the congregation assembled, I watched the 
fathers and mothers of these children. They? 
too, were broad-shouldered, tall, and straight, 
especially the women. Even old women were 
straight, like the negroes one sees at the South 
walking with burdens on their heads. 

" Five days later I saw, in Halifax, the cele- 
bration of the anniversary of the settlement of 
the Province. The children of the city and 



166 SEX IN EDUCATION. 

of some of tlie neighboring towns marched 
in ' Bands of Hope,' and processions such as 
we see in the cities of the States on the 
Fourth of July. This was just the oppor- 
tunity I wanted. It was the same here as in 
the country, I counted, on that day, just 
eleven sickly-looking children ; no more ! 
Such brilliant cheeks, such merry eyes, such 
evident strength, — it was a scene to kindle 
the dullest soul ! There were scores of little 
ones there, whose droll, fat legs would have 
drawn a crowd in Central Park ; and they all 
had that same quiet, composed, well-balanced 
expression of countenance of which I spoke 
before, and of which it would be hard to find 
an instance in all Central Park. 

" Climate, undoubtedly, has something to 
do with this. The air is moist ; and the mer- 
cury rarely rises above 80°, or falls below 10°. 
Also the comparative quiet of their lives helps 
to make them so beautiful and strong^. But 
the most significant fact to my mind is, that, 
until the past year, there have been in Nova 
Scotia no public schools, comparatively few 



TEE EUROPEAN WAY. 167 

private ones ; and in these there is no severe 
pressure brought to bear on the pupils. . . . 
I must not be understood to argue from the 
health of the children of Nova Scotia, as con- 
trasted with the lack of health among our 
children, that it is best to have no public 
schools ; only that it is better to have no pub- 
lic schools than to have such public schools 
as are now killing off our children. ... In 
Massachusetts, the mortality from diseases of 
the brain and nervous system is eleven per 
cent. In Nova Scotia it is only eight per 
cent." * 

It would be interesting and instructive to 
ascertain, if we could, the regimen of female 
education in Europe. The acknowledged and 
unmistakable differences between American 
and European girls and women — the deli- 
cate bloom, unnatural weakness, and prema- 
ture decay of the former, contrasted with the 
bronzed complexion, developed form, and 
enduring force of the latter — are not ade- 

* Bits of Talk. By H. H. Pp. 71-75. 



168 SEX IN EDUCATION. 

quately explained by climate. Given suffi- 
cient time, difference of climate will produce 
immense differences of form, color, and force 
in the same species of animals and men. But 
a century does not afford a period long enough 
for the production of great changes. That 
length of time could not transform the sturdy 
German fraulein and robust English damsel 
into the fragile American miss. Everybody 
recognizes and laments the change that has 
been and is going on. " The race of strong, 
hardy, cheerful girls, that used to grow up in 
country places, and made the bright, neat, 
New-England kitchens of olden times, — the 
girls that could wash, iron, brew, bake, har- 
ness a horse and drive him, no less than braid 
straw, embroider, draw, paint, and read in- 
numerable books, — this race of women, pride 
of olden time, is daily lessening ; and, in their 
stead, come the fragile, easj^-fatigued, lan- 
guid girls of a modern age, drilled in book- 
learning, ignorant of common things." * No 
f 

* House and Home Papers. By Harriet Beecher Stowe. 
P. 205. 



THE EUROPEAN WAT. 169 

similar change has been wrought, during the 
past century, upon the mass of females in 
Europe. There — - 

"Nature keeps the reverent frame 
With which her years began." 

If we could ascertain the regimen of European 
female education, so as to compare it fairly 
with the American plan of the identical edu- 
cation of the sexes, it is not impossible that 
the comparison might teach us how it is, that 
conservation of female force makes a part of 
trans- Atlantic, and deterioration of the same 
force a part of cis- Atlantic civilization. It is 
probable such an inquiry would show that the 
disregard of the female organization, which is 
a palpable and pervading principle of Ameri- 
can education, either does not exist at all in 
Europe, or exists only in a limited degree. 

With the hope of obtaining information 
upon this point, the writer addressed inquiries 
to various individuals, who would be likely to 
have the desired knowledge. Only a few an- 
swers to his inquiries have been received up to 
the present writing ; more are promised by and 



170 i^^X IN EDUCATION. 

by. The subject is a delicate and difficult 
one to investigate. The reports of committees 
and examining boards, of ministers of instruc- 
tion, and other officials, throw little or no light 
upon it. The matter belongs so much to the 
domestic economy of the household and 
school, that it is not easy to learn much that 
is definite about it except by personal inspec- 
tion and inquiry. The little information that 
has been received, however, is important. It 
indicates, if it does not demonstrate, an 
essential difference between the regimen or 
organization, using these terms in their broad- 
est sense, of female education in America 
and in Europe. 

Dr. H. Hagen, an eminent physician and 
naturalist of Konigsburg, Prussia, now con- 
nected with the Museum of Comparative Zo- 
ology at Cambridge, writes from Germany, 
where he has been lately, in reply to these in- 
quiries, as follows : — 

NuKEMBEKG, July 23, 1873. 

Dear Sir, — The information, given by 
two prominent physicians in Berlin, in an- 



THE EUROPEAN WAY. 171 

swer to the questions in your letter, is mostly 
of a negative character. I believe them to 
prove that generally girls here are doing very 
well as to the catamenial function. 

First, most of the girls in North Germany 
begin this function in the fifteenth j^ear, or 
even later ; of course some few sooner, even 
in the twelth year or before ; but the rule is 
after the fifteenth year. Now, nearly all leave 
the school in the fifteenth year, and then fol- 
low some lectures given at home at leisure. 
The school-girls are of course rarely troubled 
by the periodical function. 

There is an established kind of tradition 
giving the rule for the regimen during the 
catamenial period : this regimen goes from 
mother to daughter, and the advice of physi- 
cians is seldom asked for with regard to it. 
As a rule, the greatest care is taken to avoid 
any cold or exposure at this time. If the 
girls are still school-girls, they go to school, 
study and write as at other times, provided 
the function is normally performed. 

School-girls never ride in Germany, nor are 



172 SEX IN EDUCATION 

they invited to parties or to dancing-parties. 
All this comes after the school. And even 
then care is taken to stay at home when the 
periodical function is present. 

Concerning the health of the German girls, 
as compared with American girls, the Ger- 
man physicians have not sufficient informa- 
tion to warrant any statement. But the 
health of the German girls is commonly good 
except in the higher classes in the great cap- 
itals, where the same obnoxious agencies are 
to be found in Germany as in the whole 
world. But here also there is a very strong 
exception, or, better, a difference between 
America and Germany, as German girls are 
never accustomed to the free manners and 
modes of life of American girls. As a rule, in 
Germany, the mother directs the manner of 
living of the daughter entirely. 

I shall have more and better information 
some time later. 

Yours, 

H. Hagen. 



THE EUROPEAN WAY. 173 

A German lady, who was educated in the 
schools of Dantzic, Prussia, afforded informa- 
tion, which, as far as it went, confirmed 
the above. Three customs, or habits, which 
exert a great influence upon the health and 
development of girls, appear from Dr. 
Hagen's letter to make a part of the German 
female educational regimen. The first is, that 
girls leave school at about the age of fifteen 
or sixteen, that is, as soon as the epoch of 
rapid sexual development arrives. It appears, 
moreover, that during this epoch, or the 
greater part of it, a German girl's education 
is carried on at home, by means of lectures 
or private arrangements. These, of course, 
are not as inflexible as the rigid rules of a 
technical school, and admit of easy adjust- 
ment to the periodical demands of the female 
constitution. The second is the traditional 
motherly supervision and careful regimen of 
the catamenial week. Evidently the notion 
that a boy's education and a girl's education 
should be the same, and that the same means 
the boy's, has not yet penetrated the German 



174 SEX IN EDUCATIOm 

mind. This has not yet evolved the idea of 
the identical education of the sexes. It 
appears that in Germany, schools, studies, 
parties, walks, rides, dances, and the like, are 
not allowed to displace or derange the de- 
mands of Nature. The female organization 
is respected. The third custom is, that Ger- 
man school-girls are not invited to parties at 
all. " All this comes after the school," says. 
Dr. Hagen. The brain is not worked by day 
in the labor of study, and tried by night 
with the excitement of the ball. Pleasant 
recreation for children of both sexes, and 
abundance of it, is provided for them, all 
over Germany, — is regarded as necessity for 
them, — is made a part of their daily life; 
but then it is open-air, oxygen-surrounding, 
blood-making, health-giving, innocent recre- 
ation; not gas, furnaces, low necks, spinal 
trails, the civiHzed representatives of caudal 
appendages, and late hours. 

Desirous of obtaining, if possible, a more 
exact notion than even a physician could 
give of the German, traditional method of 



THE EUROPEAN WAT, 175 

managing the catamenial function for the 
first few years after its appearance, I made in- 
quiries of a German lady, now a mother, whose 
family name holds an honored place, both in 
German diplomacy and science, and who 
has enjoyed corresponding opportunities for 
an experimental acquaintance with the Ger- 
man regimen of female education. The 
following is her reply. For obvious reasons, 
the name of the writer is not given. She 
has been much in this country as well as in 
Germany; a fact that explains the know- 
edge of American customs that her letter 
exhibits. 

My Dear Doctoe, — I have great pleas- 
ure in answering your inquiries in regard to 
the course, which, to my knowledge, German 
mothers adopt with their daughters at the 
catamenial period. As soon as a girl attains 
maturity in this respect, which is seldom 
before the age of sixteen, she is ordered to 
observe complete rest ; not only rest of the 
body, but rest of the mind. Many mothers 



176 SEX m EDUCATION. 

oblige their daughters to remain in bed for 
three days, if they are at all delicate in 
health; but even those who are physically 
very strong are obliged to abstain from 
study, to remain in their rooms for three 
days, and keep perfectly quiet. During the 
whole of each period, they are not allowed 
to run, walk much, ride, skate, or dance. In 
fact, entire repose is strictly enforced in 
every well-regulated household and school. 
A German girl would consider the idea of 
going to a party at such times as simply 
preposterous ; and the difference that exists 
in this respect in America is wholly unintel- 
ligible to them. 

As a general rule, a married woman in 
Germany, eve'^n after she has had many 
children, is as strong and healthy, if not 
more so, than when she was a girl. In 
America, with a few exceptions, it appears 
to be the reverse ; and, I have no doubt, it 
is owing to the want of care on the part of 
girls at this particular time, and to the 
neglect of their mothers to enforce proper 
rules in this most important matter. 



THE EUROPEAN WAT, 177 

It has seemed to me, often, that the 
difference in the education of girls in Ameri- 
ca and in Germany, as regards their physical 
training, is, that in America it is marked by 
a great degree of recklessness; while in 
Germany, the erring, if it can be called 
erring, is on the side of anxious,, extreme 
caution. Therefore beautiful American girls 
fade rapidly ; while the German girls, who 
do not possess the same natural advantages, 
do possess, as a rule, good, permanent health, 
which goes hand-in-hand with happiness and 
enjoyment of life. 

Believe me, 

'Very truly yours, 



June 21, 1873. "S 

This letter confirms the statement of Dr. 
Hagen, and shows that the educational and 
social regimen of a German school-girl is 
widely different from that of her American 
sister. Perhaps, as is intimated above, the 
German way, which is probably the Euro- 

12 



178 SEX IN education: 

pean way also, may err on the side of too 
great confinement and caution; and that a 
medium between that and the recklessness 
of the American way would yield a better 
result than either one of them. 

German peasant girls and women work in 
the field and shop with and like men. 
None who have seen their stout and brawny 
arms can doubt the force with which they 
wield the hoe and axe. I once saw, in the 
streets of Coblentz, a woman and a donkey 
yoked to the same cart, while a man, with a 
whip in his hand, drove the team. The by- 
standers did not seem to look upon the mov- 
ing group as if it were an unusual spectacle. 
The donkey appeared to be the most intelli- 
gent and refined of the three. The sight 
symbolized the physical force and infamous 
degradation of the lower classes of women in 
Europe. The urgent problem of modern 
civilization is how to retain this force, and get 
rid of the degradation. Physiology declares 
that the solution of it will only be possible 
when the education of girls is made appro- 



THE EUROPEAN WAY, 179 

priate to their organization. A German girl, 
yoked with a donkey and dragging a cart, 
is an exhibition of monstrous muscular and 
aborted brain development. An American 
girl, yoked with a dictionary and dragging 
the catamenia, is an exhibition of monstrous 
brain and aborted ovarian development. 

The investigations incident to the prepa- 
ration of this monograph have suggested a 
number of subjects* kindred to the one of 
which it treats, that ought to be discussed 
from the physiological standpoint in the 
interest of sound education. Some, and per- 
haps the most important, of them are the 
relation of the male organization, so far as 
it is different from the female, to the labor 
of education and of life ; the comparative 
influence of crowding studies, that is of 
excessive brain activity, upon the cerebral 
metamorphosis of the two sexes; the influ- 
ence of study, or brain activity, upon sleep, 
and through sleep, or the want of it, upon 
nutrition and development ; and, most impor- 
tant of all, the true relation of education to 



180 SEX IN EDUCATION. 

the just and harmonious development of every 
part, both of the male and female organiza- 
tion, in which the rightful control of the 
cerebral ganglia over the whole system and 
all its functions shall be assured in each sex, 
and thus each be enabled to obtain the 
largest possible amount of intellectual and 
spiritual power. The discussion of these 
subjects at the present time would largely 
exceed the natural limits of this essay. 
They can only be suggested now, with the 
hope that other and abler observers may be 
induced to examine and discuss them. 

In conclusion, let us remember that physiol- 
ogy confirms the hope of the race by assert- 
ing that the loftiest heights of intellectual 
and spiritual vision and force are free to each 
sex, and accessible by each ; but adds that 
each must climb in its own way, and accept 
its own limitations, and, when this is done, 
promises that each will find the doing of it, 
not to weaken or diminish, but to develop 
power. Physiology condemns the identical, 
and pleads for the appropriate education of 



TEE EUROPEAN WAY. 181 

the sexes, so that boys may become men, and 
girls women, and both have a fair chance to 
do and become their best. 



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